This week, I developed and gave a presentation to a group on the importance of social media and how every professional can utilize the tools to brand themselves. It was an interesting topic, from my point of view. The group that asked me to present on it actually came up with the title and the topic, I just filled in the rest through the knowledge I already had about the topic.
I live and breathe web-marketing, and social media is playing such a large part in it nowadays. Therefore, it is important to embrace it because it is not going away any time soon.
In a recent blog post, I suggested the fact that Facebook might as well replace websites. That suggestion is going a tad extreme, but I was trying to point out the fact that people are searching more and more for people and businesses on social networking sites. Given this, it is extremely vital to each of us that we are putting useful and relevant content on our profiles and interacting with our network in a way that promotes a healthy individual brand.
For this particular group I presented to, they were all staffing and recruiting experts. So I simply pointed to the fact that they need to decide how they wish to portray themselves personally – as just another connection, or a connection that is an expert in their particular industry.
So often I see individuals muddying the water with obscure posts about many different topics rather than consistent posts and commentary about a specific industry or topic. It is extremely important, especially for those that are freelancers, to clarify what it is they are an expert in, and facilitate that personal branding through social networking.
Without going too in depth, I wanted to share my presentation from this week. It is only the slides at this point, but I hope to make it into a recorded version soon. Enjoy and please leave your thoughts below.