The power of personal branding is well-documented.
If you’re an entrepreneur, your personal brand can help you grow your business. If you’re an athlete, your personal brand can help you attract lucrative commercial sponsorships. If you’re an employee, your personal brand can be all you need to secure those promotions at work.
We all want to build great personal brands, but it’s easier said than done. With the right information, though, you can do it.
In this article, our focus is on how to build a personal brand on Instagram. Read on for expert insight.
Why Build a Personal Brand Instagram?
Before we dive into the specifics of building a personal brand on Instagram, it’s important to pause and ask: Why Instagram?
There are many platforms on which you can build a personal brand. These include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. You can even build a personal brand through a personal website and blog.
To build a successful personal brand, it’s going to take at least multiple platforms. So, there’s a good chance you already have a presence on other channels, but you want to expand the brand.
You couldn’t have made a better choice than Instagram. With about 1 billion monthly active users, IG will expose your personal brand to a vast audience. Plus, IG is ideal for the visual aspects of personal branding.
Now that you know why Instagram is ideal for personal branding, let’s focus on what you can do to build your brand.
Research Your Niche
What’s the niche?
While it’s possible to build a personal brand that doesn’t have a specific niche, you’re bound to reap the best results when you have a niche. For instance, your niche could be fitness, politics, music, law, or medicine. It all depends on what you do or what your personal interests are.
If you’re an attorney, for example, you certainly want to build your personal brand as an attorney. You want to be known as a professional who practices in a certain field of law.
Once you have established your niche, research it on Instagram. This will enable you to identify the potential audience size in your chosen niche, as well as the competing brands.
Researching a niche is easy. Find the hashtags that are related to the niche. For example, if you’re a criminal defense attorney, search #criminallaw and see what comes up.
You should also be able to flesh out the audience characteristics. What’s the audience’s average age, for instance?
Spell Out Your Goals
What do you aim to achieve from building a personal brand on Instagram?
Different people will have different goals. For example, an entrepreneur might want a personal brand to help them secure more clients. A musician might want to build their global fanbase. A lawyer will likely want to attract more clients to their practice.
Other people build a personal brand because they want to build and position themselves as voices of authority in the niche.
Whatever your goal is, it’s essential to write it down. This is akin to drawing a business plan when you’re starting a business. With clear goals, it will be easy to assess the performance of your personal branding efforts and determine whether you’re on track.
Create a Brand Profile
As a personal brand, what are you all about? If someone were to visit your profile, what would they take away? Or what would be the first impressions?
Before you create an account on Instagram, take time to draw your brand profile. List down all the traits you’d want to be associated with your brand.
Let’s say you’re a Yoga instructor. Yoga is associated with calmness and silence. When you get to create an Instagram page, right from the first day your page should give off these traits.
As such, think about the images you’ll use on your profile before you sign up. If you’ll be using a headshot – which is highly advisable when you’re building a personal brand – ensure it’s a headshot that represents the brand you want to build. Can you imagine visiting the page of a yoga instructor only to the profile picture has the instructor wearing a suit?
Optimize Your Instagram Profile
Instagram provides a range of page optimization tools. Some people make the mistake of creating posts as soon as they sign up. Yet, the first step should be to fill out all the necessary profile details.
Use the bio section to tell the world who you are – albeit briefly. Write your name as you’d like your personal brand to be known. If there are hashtags that define your brand, you can include them in the bio section, but stick to one or two.
If you have a personal website or blog, you can include the link as well.
Keep in mind that profile authenticity helps when you want to get verified on Instagram.
Create a Content Strategy
Growing a brand on Instagram is all about posting content that’s entertaining, informative, and above all, relevant to your audience.
If you’re a lawyer and your personal brand is built around your profession, you have no business posting content that isn’t related to the profession. Your audience certainly wants legal advice. Of course, you can throw in personal posts here and there that have nothing to do with your law practice. It’s a nice way to add some personality to your brand.
Having a content strategy keeps you on track. You’ll always have something relevant to post when it’s time to post.
Your posts might not have an engagement in the early days, but as you gain more followers, people will start to like and comment. Engage with them.
Build a Personal Brand on Instagram
You’ve made a smart decision to build a personal brand on Instagram. IG is one of the biggest social platforms with actively engaged users. Use this advice on how to build a personal brand and soon enough you’ll see the results.
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