3 Personal Branding and Social Media Predictions That Will Impact Your Small Business
1Personal branding, people and their careers marked as brands, will always remain relevant as professionals look for ways to standout from their competition and market themselves to the world.
But many people are still fuzzy about what personal branding truly means and how to attain one. Marin Lindstrom, branding expert and author of ‘Brandwashed’ and ‘Buyology’, defines branding as the ability for someone to:
“Be 100% transparent. Nothing less. The consumer needs to know what you know about them. Furthermore, they must be told exactly how you intend to use the information. If they don’t like what they see, they need a fair and easy way to opt out.”
Today’s innovation in technology, the advent of the Internet, online marketing, and social media has made it easier than ever for professionals to reach out to a specific audience and brand themselves. With this newfound opportunity, personal branding predictions, with social media implications, have followed – here are a few of them:
1. Paperless Resumes
Prediction: LinkedIn will replace resumes and job boards.
“As of June 30, 2012, professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of approximately two new members per second,” according to LinkedIn company reports. And “as of August 2, 2012, LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 175 million members in over 200 countries and territories. To-date, LinkedIn members completed nearly 4.2 billion professionally-oriented searches on the platform in 2011 and are on pace to surpass 5.3 billion in 2012.”
Could LinkedIn eclipse the need for you to review hundreds of physical resumes and post to job boards?
Absolutely. Networking and the use of one’s own social graph can and has helped people tap into their connections online. Although the concept of asking for one’s personal URL is hard to imagine for some, it could become a future reality as the professional social network continues developments in its Internet recruitment and job search technologies.
2. Social Professionals
Prediction: Personal and professional lives will converge.
Facebook recently reached 1 billion monthly active users this year, while Twitter has over 500 million users that send an average of 140 million tweets people sent per day, over a period of thirty days.
Numbers don’t lie. Today’s professional can’t overlook the power of social media.
