This is a common question that people ask, along with similar questions like “how do I brand myself” and “why should I try to protect my brand?” Many people interested in branding don’t realize that the common profiles we share publicly contribute a great deal to our overall brand. This is a simple list of perks and benefits to focusing on using profiles to improve your professional branding efforts:
Professional Branding Profiles Boost Visibility
When considering whether or not a profile online can help with your brand, it’s important to first realize that no single profile is going to offer the perfect solution. Instead, in an effort to gain the most visibility, you should focus on using a number of profiles that all point to a central hub – where you want to send all your traffic. That central hub can be anything from a primary profile to a blog or website. The more optimized profiles you have to help you toot your own horn, the better.
Professional Branding Profiles to Influence What People Find
With a professional profile you can let your information be public without fear of announcing private information on the web. With an open approach to using profiles for branding and self-promotion you can ensure that your content gets indexed. If optimized properly for targeted keywords and names you’ll start to show for relevant searches on sites like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If someone does a name search, your optimized profiles will come up before most other sites.
Your Branding Profiles Can Build Page Rank and Search Position
Some profile sites have a high page rank. When you start promoting your blog, website or other page through your branding profiles you can setup a keyword optimized link. For example – with LinkedIn you can use the category “other” for a URL in your profile and label the link anything you like.
Branding Profiles Can Cover you on Searches
Those who you do business with – be they customers, clients, managers, other businesses, etc. – will likely use the web to find more information about who you are. If you optimize your profiles properly, providing the most pertinent and glowing information about yourself, you will have a great deal of positive information up front for them to digest.
A Professional Branding Profile Shows Authenticity
If you’re using a natural tone when crafting your profiles and you stick to a unified and consistent message across all of the social profiles and networks then you’re truly showing your authenticity. There will be little confusion about who you are and what you have to offer because every profile you own clearly states your message.
This is also a great opportunity to highlight your personality. Far too many of us drop resume data into profiles and walk away from it. Take the time to go into detail with your profiles. Make them searchable, valuable and all about you. Write with the idea of self-promotion in mind so those people who land on your profile feel compelled to learn more about who you are.
My name is Matthew E. Alleyne, A.K.A The “Toot" Guy - founder of WikiToot.com. I have been a serial entrepreneur my entire life, starting when I was in my nappies – it’s just in my blood!
For the last 20 years I’ve launched one successful business after another and have fallen in with the crowd of best-selling authors and public speakers in the branding circuit.
When I’m not involved in hands-on interaction with my businesses, I’m mentoring others. I’ve led hundreds to personal and professional success and look forward to continuing that trend.