Why Should Experts Build Their Personal Brand?
Dedicating years of your life to pursuing knowledge and generating ideas around a topic is costly. It costs years in classrooms learning, countless hours hunched over your desk researching and writing, and even longer trying to present and disseminate your ideas. It’s important to receive a return on that investment.
When an expert asks me why they should devote time and energy to building their online brand, I give two main reasons:
- Institutions no longer have a monopoly on information. Individuals are increasingly the primary disseminators of ideas and knowledge in today’s society. Individual thought leaders are those who are effective at sharing this knowledge. They are effective at sharing their work and building large audiences around their ideas.
- Personal branding is no longer optional in today’s day and age. If people are searching for you online, they will make judgments based on what they find. If people aren’t searching for you, is your work even relevant? To put your best foot forward and be a relevant voice, it is important to build your brand.
In addition to these societal shifts, there are many benefits one can gain by building their online brand. Specifically, I point to these three key benefits for those who are successful at brand building.
BUILD RELATIONSHIPS AND FURTHER OPPORTUNITIES
Brand building should be seen as a way to further one’s career both on and offline. The goal should not simply be to see your follower count grow bigger, but instead, it should be to grow relationships and foster new work opportunities.
Here are some quick examples of opportunities that could come about as a result of building your brand:
- A colleague in your field or related field offers to collaborate on a research or writing project
- A reliable source offers access to a data set you need to finish your research
- An influential person in the field reaches out to set up a meeting
- A member of the media requests to hear more about your work
I recommend setting goals for the types of relationships you’d like to build or opportunities you want to pursue from the beginning. This will be helpful in identifying some key people to engage with on social media. However, as in most offline interactions, there may be amazing career developments that come together you could have never predicted. So keep an open mind and an eye out for these as well.
REACH MORE PEOPLE
An active online presence has the power to connect you and your ideas to more people than you could possibly ever meet in real life. Social media platforms are a public forum for exchanging ideas and finding resources. It has become a great place for people to explore their interests and find the materials they need for work.
If you are regularly published online, where can interested people read more? By being active on social media, those who run across your work can read more from you and see your latest updates. Social media also allows for people searching the platforms for related topics to find your work and has the power to get your writing in front of your target audience.
GROW INFLUENCE
If you are reaching more people and creating more opportunities for yourself along the way, your influence will grow!
As you reach more people, your work has the potential to impact real change. It allows your proposed solutions to be discussed, and have a greater chance of being implemented. New opportunities originating through social media have the potential to help you produce new and better work products that can be influential someday.
Building your brand online is more than seeking fame or gaining a following for the sake of having thousands or millions of people follow you online (while that could be nice, it is not necessarily helping you reach your goals).
Instead, it is about translating what you have already been doing and presenting it online. It is about getting your work in front of the right people who can make a difference. Helping you make a greater impact by finding others as excited about your proposed solutions as you are.
