Seeing social media influencers in real life is like seeing a fish you think you know REALLY well out of water. Even though we don’t know them personally, we still follow their lives like they’re our best friends. But why?
The answer is actually simple. They’ve created a super unique brand around their personality and product/service. They’ve probably built such a solid personal brand, in fact, that you might actually feel like you know them as well as you know your friends IRL.
WHAT THE HECK IS A “PERSONAL BRAND?”
I can sum this up with two words, authenticity and consistency. We feel like we’re beating a dead horse sometimes when we say that your brand (personal or professional) should look and sound like you in real life. That’s where the authenticity comes from.
Consistency is key, too. Followers have to know what kind of person they’re following and what they can expect from that person. Whether it is the frequency of posting or type of content, we LOVE predictability on social media! Yep, humans are kind of boring like that.
We want to follow people who inspire or relate to us in some form. If you’re a frequent poster, your followers are likely to know everything about you and your brand pretty quickly (so you’ll want to create a lot of relatable or inspiring content). But… If you hardly ever post, then you might have to make every post count in order for followers to create hype around you. If you’re looking to become an influencer in less than 5 years, you should probably be a frequent poster. Regardless, those rare posters have made that mystery a part of their brand and they’re stickin’ to it!
I’M INTERESTED IN CREATING A PERSONAL BRAND, WHERE DO I SIGN UP?
You’ve got to ask yourself a lot of questions before you or your business can be considered influencers. If you have a million followers already, then you can move along, this article isn’t for you.
The biggest and possibly hardest (and most important!) question you have to answer is, “what is my brand persona?” We know it’s hard to answer so we actually made a quiz for you so you can answer that in like 2 minutes.
Oh, you thought it was that easy? Nope, you still have a lot of work to do. You need to work on your voice and visuals. Remember, authenticity and consistency are key. We also have a “cheat sheet” of sorts for this process. It’s called Brand Camp and it, too, is free. But we only do it ever so often so you might have to wait on that (shameless plug to sign up to get our emails so you can be in the know when we do another Brand Camp).
Your voice could be anything from the sweet, modest mom who loves monster trucks to a punk rock bunny lover. Whatever your thing is, stick to it and make sure you get those visuals to match your voice in an authentic and consistent way.
Look, we’re not in the business of helping you create an influencer platform (and we don’t have all the answers). What we are in the business of is building unbreakable brands by helping you find your brand voice and create visuals that match that voice. So whether it’s a small business you want to brand, or yourself, we’re here to help.
Need some inspiration? Follow us on the gram! @Ampersand_studios