SEO / SEM Blog by Search Circus

In the first of this three part series on building a personal brand on Facebook we covered some social media marketing techniques to help you plan your strategy, and select which audiences you hope to target.

Here are the next 4 steps to building a personal brand on Facebook:

4. Fill Your Profile
Facebook allows you to literally create an image of yourself. Depending on your professional goals, focus on filling out the education and work sections, just as you would your resume. Link to past work, school, or extracurricular organizations’ Facebook pages to network for jobs or information in your industry. Link to any of your blogs, websites, or other social media profiles. You can use keywords to target Facebook searches for potential jobs by highlighting certain skills.

5. Import Friends To Grow Your Network
Each month, import your contacts from your email and IM accounts, and any other online contacts you may have. Essentially you want Facebook to be fully integrated and pervasive in your online brand. The Facebook Connect plug-in is a great way to promote your blog, so your friends can ‘like’ and promote your content.

6. Update Your Status
Update your status frequently (but not too frequently) to shout a message to a large audience. Status updates reflect who you are and what you’re about. Update your status with links to your latest blog content, press releases, and new projects you’re involved with. Status updates are vital to keep people informed about your latest doings and help you push your content. If you have a smartphone you can constantly update your status with interesting or entertaining pictures and videos to really catch people’s eye.

7. Start A Group/Page
Facebook groups can help you bring people together. When you help people network and solve problems, they will help you. Contribute to the Group and use it to promote your content, your business, and yourself. A Facebook page is much like a profile, except it represents a brand, rather than a person. Using pages can be a great way to push your brand and can be a great alternative to your profile for the face of your professional life.

In the last and final post, we’ll discuss more ways to promote your brand and content and help more people find you through Facebook.

Celebrities, CEOs, and especially the common person are active on Facebook and can be reached easily without restriction. With nearly a billion users, Facebook has become an essential tool to connect with other people, on par with our cell phones and email accounts.

The social media platform presents a particularly effective means of experimenting with branding. Since Facebook offers the capability to share resources and multimedia throughout your day, from the palm of your hand, it gives you the ability to define and promote a unique brand of yourself. Here are nine ways to promote your personal brand through social media marketing.

1. Know Your Audience
While Facebook’s billions of users allow you to spread information quickly, it also means you can easily spread information to the wrong audiences. Decide now what audiences you want to connect with on Facebook. Do you want to network with professionals in your industry for work and business opportunities? Or would you rather present your profile to the open public for fame and maximum reach.

2. Branding Strategy
Whether you like it or not, if you’re on Facebook you are already branding yourself. Depending on your passions and goals, you will want to create a brand that appeals to your target market. Start analyzing how your brand is being portrayed and how other people might perceive it. Take steps to customize it to your ideal brand.

3. Set Privacy Settings
Facebook allows users to layer their profile visibility so you can hide parts of your profile from certain people or groups of people and expose other parts of your profile to other audiences. Making your profile public is necessary if you hope to become more visible in your industry and will help you achieve rank in name searches.

Stay tuned for more techniques to promote your personal Facebook Brand!