Personal and Professional Brands
A Look At My Social Media
What is a Brand? A Fizzy Analysis
Pepsi- an ice cold, shiny blue can is stamped with a circular red and white logo that is just abstract enough to hold your attention. Your mouth starts to water as the crisp taste of dark carbonation splashes into your memory. Fizzy bubbles erupt on your tongue and sweetly exfoliate the back of your throat. Doesn’t pizza sound great right about now? Suddenly, you’re transported back to your family’s living room where you just finished your second slice. Super Bowl LIV is on and the Pepsi Halftime Show is about to begin! Skakira and Jennifer Lopez are performing, but you hardly notice because your uncle spills nacho cheese on his lucky jersey! His thundering curses to the sports gods startles your food-coma induced cousin who falls out of her chair. Mom yells “okurrr” from the top of her lungs, just like Cari B in the earlier Pepsi Commercial. You’ve never laughed this hard in your entire life!
This is branding- encompassing the physical and emotional ties to who you are. “Put simply, your ‘brand’ is what your prospect thinks of when he or she hears your brand name,” (McLaughlin, 2012). Whether or not we know it, each one of us has a personal and professional brand to share with the world, just like a blue can of soda.
Personal Brand on Instagram
“Personal branding is a way of establishing and consistently reinforcing who you are and what you stand for in your career and life,” (Liu, 2018). The use of social media makes it easier than ever to share our thoughts, ideas, and interests that make up our personal and professional brands. Instagram has been my favorite platform to show who I am as a personal brand while connecting with friends and family. This is largely attributed to its inviting and easy-to-use functionality, allowing me to quickly share the best bits and pieces of my personal life based on my day-to-day activities. A major theme found in my pictures is the love for the people in my personal life. I try to include as many of them in my posts as I can, even though I do not post traditional Instagram picture posts very often.
The Instagram Stories function is my favorite feature on the platform and a great avenue for an audience to identify a brand’s sense of self (Schawbel, 2019). Through this short lived content, Instagram Stories allow me to engage in my creative side. My love for art and graphic design are displayed through the extra time and effort I spend decorating my Instagram Stories with bright colors, drawings, and stickers. These short bursts alongside my traditional posts identify my personal brand: caring, fun, and creative.
Professional Brand on LinkedIn
As a young professional, I joined LinkedIn to network and connect with other professionals in my field.This platform fosters business culture and users’ exposure to other professionals through a similar interface as Facebook.
Social media is being used to learn more about potential job candidates, so it is important to present ones’ self online in a positive way. In fact, as many as 64% of employers review candidate social media profiles, (Do Employers View Your Professional Social Network Before Hiring, 2020). In hindsight, design your professional social media profiles to display your best work skills and career accomplishments.
To create a better professional brand image, my LinkedIn profile features my current resume and accurate contact information. Also, a professional profile picture is essential to a successful LinkedIn profile and will be the focal point of a person’s professional brand. For my picture I chose to wear a pink blazer and polka dot dress, an appropriate, yet bold ensemble designed to stand apart from the crowd. To maintain my social presence, I engage with other users through insightful and brassy comments on others’ posts to spark enjoyable conversation.Together, this encapsulates my professional brand: proper, skillful, and forward.
Facebook- The Best of Both Worlds
I’ll say it… I haven’t updated my Facebook profile picture since 2017. (Maybe I just like the picture.) Truly, I rarely post anything on my wall or anyone else’s for that matter. Despite the three year gap in my picture update and my lack of online presence, I am part of the 74% of users who visit the site at least once a day, (Chen, 2020). My use of Facebook contributes to both my personal and professional brand by doubling as a tool for work and a place to post vacation pictures
Facebook was my first experience with social media. For this reason, I have always used Facebook with caution and try to only add friends who I personally know, unlike my Instagram account. I still carry my Facebook discretion, but I try to keep a low profile by passively using the platform to see my “Friends” and their activities. I silently enjoy watching videos that other people have shared, but if I really like a piece of content I am occasionally known to give it a “like.”
Although I may seem inactive on this platform, Facebook has become an essential part of my job. Like many jobs, there are lots of employees who need to trade shifts with each other. However, there is not a well established method of displaying all the employees who need shifts traded in a single space. As a result, employees have voluntarily created private Facebook Groups to communicate shift trading. These Groups are where most of my displayed Facebook activity happens, largely in part to the necessity of the situation.
Facebook has become a space for personal and professional use and has become the intersection of my personal and professional brand. It goes to show that while the two seem to exist independently, each cultivate the other. In retrospect, being aware of what you are posting is an important part of social media culture because you never know when you will need to jump from personal to professional in a split second.
Citations
Chen, J. (2020, May 15). Social media demographics to inform your brand’s strategy in 2020. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/new-social-media-demographics/
Do employers view your professional social network before hiring. (2020) https://www.robertwalters.co.uk/career-advice/Finding-your-next-career/64-percent-of-employers-view-candidate-professional-social-network-profiles-before-hiring.html
Liu, J. (2018, May 8). 5 Ways To Build Your Personal Brand At Work. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephliu/2018/04/30/personal-brand-work/#2563c5587232
McLaughlin, Jerry. “What Is a Brand, Anyway?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 Jan. 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/jerrymclaughlin/2011/12/21/what-is-a-brand-anyway/.
Schawbel, D. (2019, April 19). Get More Followers for Your Personal Brand with Instagram Stories. Retrieved from https://www.business2community.com/instagram/get-more-followers-for-your-personal-brand-with-instagram-stories-02191673
