Personal Branding on Social Media

The average person today spends 118 minutes per day on social media. Teens spend even more time averaging an amazing nine hours each day. This provides ample opportunity for people to share their personal stories, upload pictures, comment on tweets and “like” posts that they read. While some individuals maintain professional profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, others continuously upload photos of themselves partying or engaging in questionable behavior.

At times, young adults do not realize the potential long-term impact that negative information can have on their future careers and seemed surprised to learn that human resource departments do use social media to review potential candidates. It is incumbent upon educators to teach students about personal branding.

The globalized world we live in today has created pressures, such as fiercer competition in most aspects of our daily lives, which require people to ‘stand out’ from the crowd. Hence, the idea of differentiating one-selves is becoming a more common notion. As a response to these pressures, personal branding has taken hold among professionals. Most of the personal branding literature suggests that branding yourself is the key to personal and professional success. Moreover, the argument that “if you don’t brand yourself, others will” seems to have led to the increased interest in personal branding that we have seen for the past two decades. The term personal branding was coined by Peters, who claims that everybody has his/her own brand.

Thus, every person has the power and possibility to be the marketer for himself or herself. The premise of personal branding is therefore that branding theories, which traditionally have been employed to products and services, can be extended to include humans. This is not a new idea, marketing efforts could be applied not only to products, but also to services, persons and ideas. Today, the notion of humans being a brand is recognized among researchers because humans “1) can be strategically managed and 2) have additional associations and features of a brand. Among most advocates of personal branding, the practice has been regarded as a means to achieve professional advancement or sustain popularity.

Therefore, personal branding has traditionally been the domain of celebrities, politicians or professionals who strive to succeed in their careers. However, with the introduction of Web 2.0 and the concurrent rise of social media, personal branding has evolved into a phenomenon not only exclusive to professionals and celebrities. Today, individuals interact on social media through personalized digital profiles where they present themselves via the content that they publish and share.

By publishing personalized content on social media, individuals are able to present themselves in a favorable manner to a broad range of audiences that can be reached immediately.

Thus, social media has made personal branding both more relevant and far-reaching than ever before.

Upon completion of this course, you should be able to illustrate,

• How people create and alter their identity through images
• How images are an effective way of communicating identity
• The identity communicated through Images.
• And many more.