Personal Brand Management – Use the Ongoing Personal Brand Review

An article on Social Media Today that appeared last week provided great insight into what to do for an overall social media spring cleaning.  I also wrote about an annual review here in a December post.  But let’s not think of this as an annual review or a spring cleaning, but break this down even further into a quarterly or seasonal review.

Here are three simple action items that you are can continuously implement to make sure you are adding value to your personal brand.

Use UnTweeps for Twitter

UnTweeps is a great tool to manage the people you follow.  UnTweeps allows you to enter a day range, and if a person doesn’t have any tweets in the past x days, you automatically stop following them (30 days is the default setting, but I typically keep mine at 90 just to be safe).  If someone hasn’t tweeted a message in 3 months, there is no reason for me to follow them and just have another number in my “follows” column.

Look at your postings on Facebook

Conduct a review of your wall postings and have a look at what you discuss.  Are the topics on your wall reflective of you personally and professionally?  Are your posts reflective of your expertise, interests and passion?  Or are you posting generic friends and family type postings?  Think of Facebook as a bridge to connect personally and professionally with your friends.  It is an excellent way to connect, share valuable insight and change your personal brand in a positive direction with your network.  Letting others, even friends and family, know more about what you are about professionally is an excellent way to further network and possibly be introduced to connections in their network as well.

Connect on LinkedIn

Now, referring back to the article on Social Media Today, I love the idea of identifying the top 20 people in your network to reconnect with and continue building relationships.  I will take this one step further and recommend that you do this with a minimum of 2 people per week.  This will equate to over 100 people per year that you will be more familiar with, and more importantly, people that will more readily recognize your name and recommend you to others.

It is easy to say that engagement and value is the essence of social networking, but it truly is the case.  The more you provide helpful tips, recommendations, and insightful posts the more you will be at the top of others’ minds.  Personal branding is a hotly discussed topic but it is one that affords you the ability to take ownership of your career direction.

Social networking is a relatively simple way to positively affect your personal brand.  I share with you three suggestions to continuously enhance your brand, what would you recommend to others?

Photo Credit to Mix Magazine

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Connect with Keith McIlvaine on Twitter, LinkedIn or on the HR farmer.