Branding Yourself in Social Media and Get Your Blog More Audience - Nia M Wardani | A Logbook of Life Discoveries

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Social has been an integral part of our life. Using social media is so easy, yet optimizing it for our purpose is still not well-known. You will find in this post, how you can use your social media account for building personal branding and increase the audience of your blog.In the previous post, I wrote about what I learned on the first day of Growthing Coaching Marathon Webinar series about How to Increase Page Views of your blog or websites. On the second day, we got the opportunity to learn from Ilham Sadli and Gilang Maulani. Ilham Sadli talked about branding in social media and increasing interaction in social media for optimizing our blog and Gilang Maulani talked about tips of using smartphones for photography. I will only write about the social media in this post, and I will continue about the photography in another posts.

Benefits of Social Media

Social media can give us many benefits. Social media can help us to keep in touch with people. It can help us to get into more connections with people. But what is actually so beneficial for us, but not many people utilizing it this way, is that social media can be used as personal branding and can help us to promote our blog.

Focus on One Social Media

There are so many options for social media that we can use. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Tiktok are some options. But one thing to note when you purpose your social media for your branding or for increasing the audience of your blog is to focus on building the branding on one specific platform first, before going to other platforms. For example, Ilham Sadli is focusing his social media on twitter because his targeted community have interaction mostly on twitter. Or if you are making a professional look, maybe you would like to choose LinkedIn. Or if your targeted audience loves pictures, then you can use Instagram. You can also have trial with all platforms you have. Post the same content on different platforms, and check what most traffic sources you get from Google Analytics. In my case, for example, I found that from social media, most of my readers are redirected from Instagram, so I can focus more on my Instagram.

Several Things You Need to Consider

When you want to build your branding on social media, you should consider several thing.

• Determine your target audience

You need to determine your target audience. What is their average age? What do they like? What is the background education of your audience? What can you conclude about their lifestyle? What language do they usually use?

• What you want to be known for

Do you want to be known as someone professional? Melancholy? Critiques? Joker?

• What makes you different with other people

Give character to your social media account. Put something different, at least in the photos, or captions, or maybe give different perspective

• Determine to which direction you will bring you account in the future

You can determine what greetings you will say to your followers, or give them a different name, choose unique diction and language style, etc.

• Be consistent

Consistency is a key to building up your brand. Post your content regularly, be humble, and keep the interaction running, even if it was a just a single press of like button.

In the case of Ilham Sadli, he wants to be known as a mellow blogger in Twitter. He focused his audience in Twitter. As he prioritized Twitter, he can reach impressions in Twitter then he can ask his audience to follow his Instagram and succeeded to add 1000 followers in Instagram without changing his character in Twitter.

When we are doing interactions in social media, do not limit our interactions to the ones who has the same profession or the same field. Interaction should be done regularly: leaving comments, retweet or even only give a like. We also need to pay attention to analytics. What time our audience is more active, what is trending among our audience, etc. If we found viral content, always leave unique comments there. When we post, ask interaction of audience, for example, asking audience to tag or mention a friend related to the content.

Things to be paid attention when you are doing branding to your social media

• What is the purpose of your account?

Is it entertaining? inspiring? informative? educative? interactive? persuasive?

• What is the character of your account?

Is it funny? joyful? cool? easygoing? inspirational? professional?

• What is the language you use?

Is it simple? relax? joker? formal? complex?

• What is your language style?

Is it humble? down-to-earth? young? straightforward? critical? mature? elegant?

It is very important to keep this character throughout all your contents posted. After all, the social media is a representative of you to the internet public. Choose your character wisely. 

"Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room" 

Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon

What can make optimal social media

After you get a picture of the character, you know what types of content you are going to post, now it is time to optimize your social media, using these 5 points:

1. Content, choose the correct platform, eg, twitter is more like trendings, politics. Instagram is more for sharing beautiful pictures. Write a good caption for links, not just leaving naked link in your posts.
2. Consistent, focus on that same platform and be consistent. Post content regularly. The more frequent you post your content, the better is your traffic. If you have YouTube, the more frequent you post videos, the better is your traffic.
3. Timing, we need to choose a specific time when we are going to post our content. Choose when the audience is the most active. You can do this by frequently check the analytics.
• For Twitter, the best day to post is usually on weekdays during lunch time. 
• For YouTube, the best day is post is usually on Thursday to Friday, and you will get the most views on Saturdays to Sundays. Most YouTube audience watch YouTube on weekend so you can post around 9 AM - 11 AM on the weekends. For weekdays, the are active in the evening, so you can post around 12 PM to 4 PM during work days. 
• For Instagram, the best days to post is on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The worst to be on Sunday. Wednesday always get the highest level of interaction. You can post in Instagram during lunch time around 11 AM to 1 PM or 7 PM to 9 PM when people already finish the work. 
• For Tiktok, the best time is around 9 AM - 11 AM during weekdays, and 7 PM - 9 PM during weekends with the highest interactions level on Friday.
4. Accurately target audience. It is very important to know our audience. We should know what they like, what they are comfortable with.
5. Follow the trend, use hashtag from trending topics, but make sure you choose a good one. Don’t just follow all trend. Remember you need to keep your character in the account.

Those are several tips to build branding and get more audience to your blog. The main key is listening to the audience without losing a character to yourself. Make your character stand out. i hope this post is helpful to you. Do you have other suggestions to add? Feel free to comment below.