Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Be Who You Want To Be: The 5 Steps in Managing Your Personal Brand Online

We live in a world where social media is impacting everyone’s life as well as our career and everything that goes with it.  The competition in the labor market is rigid, so how do you get ahead among your fellow competitors? As long as you will be able to create a significant and impressive personal brand it doesn’t matter if you are a fresh graduate who is on a job hunt, an employee who wants to grow professionally or someone who wants to start a business venture.

Although social networking is available to everyone, you still need to be a responsible user and use it to your advantage especially in managing your online reputation or personal career brand. Remember that when you are using social media, your online image will generate other people’s personal and professional perceptions and opinions of you. Your employers and clients may be able to search for your profiles in Facebook or twitter to find out more about you so make sure that they will like what they are about to see.

In order to achieve your career goals through social networking; creating, keeping and improving your personal career brand should be a part of your long-term career plan. In order to put this plan into action, you also need to keep a professional presence in every social media site you register to.  Having a hard time managing your personal brand?  Worry no more because we have identified the different steps to enhance your social image and manage your brand online. Here are the following:

1. Be smart in your posts; before you post a photo, a document or write anything on your profile, make sure that these will give you positive and impressive image. Never allow your clients or followers to make negative comments about your services or products for the world to see; use a suggestion box instead. Make sure that you provide an excellent service all the time because one wrong move can ruin everything you have worked hard for.

2. Improve your privacy so that people outside your circle will not be able to post any unwanted photos or post anything damaging to your profile’s professional presence.

3. Review your online data daily as well as your circle’s posts to ensure that everything looks perfect.

4. Monitor your profile in various angles; see how it is viewed by people from outside your circle. Check if you can easily be searched by using Google alerts or online ID calculator.

Using social networking to manage your career brand takes a lot of work and effort on your part but it is all worth it because nothing spreads information faster than social media. This career management example should be taken seriously because if you make uninformed decisions and false judgments, then your online career can be ruined. Be who you want to be; manage your career with the help of social networking.