Sharing my personal branding experience to encourage others.
I am continuing to audit my social marketing on the web following the suggestions from the Personal Branding Blog. I was pretty miserable at Twitter but have been working to improve my score over the past week. Today, I am taking on Facebook where I score a big 5. This means that I am not in the ‘pick yourself off the floor’ group but merely in the ‘needs improvement’ group. I have all the pieces in place. There is a picture and my profile is complete. I connect with Facebook when I post a new item on my blog and it updates my status. I have my name registered making it my Facebook URL and finally I have my privacy configured.
What I’m not doing is using the status updates strategically to develop my brand. I have joined some groups but the groups don’t build the brand either so I don’t get a point there. I don’t have my own page either personally or for my business. Finally I haven’t tapped my community for any reason anytime.
It’s basically the same situation as with Twitter. I understand the framework but not what it can do or how to make it do something that promotes my brand.
I’m not a master of Facebook for Personal Branding but I’m getting there and if I can do it, anybody can do it.
In fairness, I should note that commenter’s (about 50%) disagreed with using Facebook professionally. They preferred to let Linkedin provide all the brand building and keep Facebook personal. I’ll stay neutral on that point, mostly because I just don’t know. I do want to have Facebook contributing to my brand and my goal is to be making money on the web. You may be only interested in the social networking. I would really like to know some other opinions however. Have you found Facebook useful for more than just personal connections? How?