Advice to Candidates: Curating Your Personal Brand

With the growth of the digital world, the ’personal brand’ has risen in importance. For top executives and graduates alike – it’s vital to curate such a brand whether or not you’re currently looking to advance in your career.

A successfully managed personal brand can help you to build and maintain a great reputation, it can make you more memorable, and it can help you to meet and connect to more people. In short, a good personal brand can help you to create opportunities for yourself.

Be Consistent Consistency is a really helpful method for branding yourself online. Most of us use a variety of different platforms – and it’s helpful to keep a common thread through your presences on all of them. Whenever possible try and use the same username. It can also be helpful to use the same avatar (or profile) picture too as this will make you instantly recognisable.

Pick a Colour Think of the branding of a big company – and you’ll likely think of the colours first. Coca Cola is synonymous with red and white, Facebook with royal blue, M&S with olive green; colour is an integral part of branding. When choosing a style for your personal website/blog/Twitter background/Facebook image – try and stick with one colour palette. This one simple act can pull together your online presence and make it look like part of a brand.

Write a ’Standard’ Bio Most social media platforms require a short and snappy ’bio’ on your profile. Spend some time putting together a few sentences that really sum up the message you want to get across about yourself. Whether it’s funny, informative, friendly or formal is up to you – but sticking to the same bio across different platforms can make your personal branding stand out.

Carry Business Cards Personal branding isn’t just online. Carrying business cards that match your brand can look very professional. This is a great piece of advice for candidates, as a business card can make you look professional at networking events and help people to remember you. There are a lot of online services, such as Moo.com, that let you design your own business cards fairly cheaply. If you want to make your personal branding really professional, choose a design that matches the style and colours of your online branding.

Got any tips you’d like to share for curating a personal brand?