“Your brand is what people
say about you when you’re
not in the room.”
-Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon)
The Importance of Personal Branding
Customers want to do business with real people, to understand what you stand for and what value you will bring to them. A personal brand is a foundational asset in career and business building. It encapsulates the values, style, skills, reputation and personality of the person and communicates these to an intended target audience.
Fig 1 and 2: Comparing profile pages for Richard Branson and his company Virgin on X show that people follow and engage with people more than corporate brands [accessed 12/3/2025]
How personal branding helps your business:
- Differentiates you from your competitors
- Can communicate your business values and principles
- Builds credibility about your skills and knowledge
- Gives your business a recognisable personality
- Provides clarity for your prospective audience/ customers
- Is a business asset you own and control
The success of the brand is in it’s relationship with it’s target audience, and the brand loyalty, sales and engagement it drives. An ill defined brand means your audience has nothing to grasp, or reasons to care about you, your business or your services.
Social media channels are effective tools for promoting a personal brand. They are free to use, and far reaching networks to communicate ideas, be found by new followers and directly listen to your audience.
“87% of social media marketers say consumers will search for brands on social media more than search engines…”
Hubspot, 2024
How to use social media for Personal Branding
Build your Social Media Branded Profiles
- Identify the platforms that your audience hang out, and build your profile on those platforms
- Keep your profile branding consistent across platforms
- Optimise for SEO, keywords and the style of the platform
- Link your profiles to your website
- Utilize a system to ideate, create and schedule consistent content
PROFILE SHOWCASE
Alex Cattoni demonstrates how personal branding profiles are adapted for each platform.
She uses branded images, style and colours unique to her brand, and hashtags and keywords for her industry niche.
All profiles have her youtube channel linked, which has the most subscribers (and is also a monetised channel)
Facebook and Instagram have an informal and fun vibe showing bright colours, graphics and brand tone. LinkedIn and X are more formal in tone and neutral in imagery.
Fig 3-6 Comparison of Social Media Brand Profiles for Alex Cattoni (Copy Posse) top-bottom Facebook, Instagram, X and Linked In [accessed 25/2/2025]
Create great Social Content
Create posts valuable to your audience using a combination of ways to express your ideas, what you offer and engage with your audience when they leave comments.
Content types that define and establish your personal brand:
Eye catching images / infographics
Stop the scroll: your audience is more likely to stop and engage with your content if it looks great.
Short form video (3 mins or less)
Short from video has to be instantly entertaining and digestible
Long form video/podcast
Great for deep dives on a topic to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise
Link content to your website/blog
Get traffic to your website by linking post content to relevant website content
Polls
Find out opinions and conduct market research by asking your audience questions
Going live
Interact directly with your audience to answer questions
Direct Message
Once you have good engagement on your posts you can continue the conversation in direct messages
Guest Posting / Collaborating
Being a guest on someone else’s blog, video or podcast establishes you as an authority in your field and introduces you to new audiences
Posting User Generated Content
Sharing positive content from your clients/audience gives your brand authority and trust.
CONTENT SHOWCASE
Seth Godin uses a wide variety of content types to keep things lively on his Instagram account: video, single images and carousels featuring guest posts, collaborations, behind the scenes, promotional graphics, user generated content and quotes from his books.
Fig 7. Godin.S (2025) Instagram. Screenshot of Seth Godin’s Instagram feed found at https://www.instagram.com/sethgodin/ [accessed 9/4/2025]
He also utilises tagging, hashtags and links to appropriate further content in the post.
Fig 8. Godin.S (2025) Instagram eth Godin (@sethgodin) • Conversations are at the heart of culture [accessed 9/4/2025]
Cross-post your content
Re-using your content across platforms is an efficient way to further spread your voice to different audiences. Best practice is to tailor the content for each platform, changing the image and text will keep it fresh. Just cross posting the exact same content can be labour saving, but looks lazy.
CROSS POSTING SHOWCASE
Gary Stevenson maximises the value of one post across his different social platforms by re-using original media and reformatting it for different social channels.
The original content is a long format video on Youtube, which has the largest audience.
Fig 9. Stevenson.G (2025) Meeting Gary’s favourite economist: Ha-Joon Chang – YouTube [accessed 11/4/2025]
Gary then uses the audio from the video to create a Spotify podcast.
Fig 10. Stevenson.G (2025) Spotify. Ha-Joon Chang Interview – Garys Economics | Podcast on Spotify [accessed 11/4/2025]
Snippets from the full length video are then used as bitesize posts on X (with links to full content), Instagram and Facebook to entice the audience to view the whole video on Youtube.
Fig 11. Stevenson.G (2025) Gary Stevenson (@garyseconomics) • Instagram photos and videos [accessed 11/4/2025]
References
Monarth.H (2022) Harvard Business Review What’s the Point of a Personal Brand? [accessed 19/12/2024]
Fuchs. J (2024 updated) Hubspot Personal Branding: What It Is, Why to Do It, & How I’m Building Mine [accessed 19/12/2024]
Heitzman.A (2024) Search Engine Journal What Is Personal Branding? Here’s Why It’s So Important [accessed 2/1/2025]
Marr.B (2023) Forbes 12 Easy Steps To Build Your Personal Brand On Social Media [accessed 24/2/2025]
Manchuka.J (2024) Semrush Social Media Marketing Crash Course [accessed 25/2/2025]
Images
Richard Branson (2025) X , available at Richard Branson (@richardbranson) / X [accessed 12/3/2025]
Virgin (2025) X, available at Virgin (@Virgin) / X [accessed 12/3/2025]
Cattoni .A (2025) Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AlexCattoni [ accessed 25/2/2025]
Cattoni. A (2025) Instagram ALEX CATTONI & THE COPY POSSE (@copyposse) • Instagram photos and videos [ accessed 25/2/2025]
Cattoni. A (2025) X Alex Cattoni (@AlexCattoni) / X[ accessed 25/2/2025]
Cattoni. A (2025) LinkedIn Alex Cattoni | LinkedIn [accessed 12/3/2025]