YouTube is the second most popular website on the Internet, right between Google and Facebook. If you have a social media strategy for personal branding, then YouTube has to be part of it. You still haven’t considered personal branding? Well, let’s start from there. The concept became popular after an article by Tom Peters, with an intriguing headline: The Brand Called You. “Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand.” That’s how it all started.
Personal branding is a marketing practice that promotes you and your skills as a brand. Mia Forbes Pirie, for example, managed to build a brand around her name. All those photos of beautiful fit women you see on Instagram – those are part of a personal branding strategy, too.
Now, the question is: why do you need a personal brand? Let’s answer that question with an experiment: Google your name, and include your hometown in the keywords, so you’ll get localized results. Would you like to improve the results people get when they search your name? That’s what personal branding is all about. It can help you get a better job, and it will help you build an authoritative online persona.
Let’s see how YouTube can help you with that. This is the place where you can upload videos with talks about your work and business, tips others can learn from, and personal experiences that cause some kind of emotion for the viewer. We’ll offer a few tips that will help you with that.
1. Define your brand
Who are you? What’s the person you want to present to the audience? Are you a makeup artist interested in offering tutorials? A fitness instructor? Marketing expert? Maybe you’re a freelance writer or graphic designer who can share fun bits of daily life? Even a boring office job can serve as a foundation for personal branding. You can publish style videos, tips that help women cope with deadlines and responsibilities, and sneak-peeks into the organization’s culture.
Remember: this is not a channel for your business, so you won’t be launching video ads through it. This will be a personal branding effort, so you must invest your full personality in it.
This is your starting point: figure out what kind of personal brand you’re going to build. It should be based on your interests and profession. Remember: you want people to see you as a great professional when they google your name. If you work in a rigid business environment, for example, filming fitness videos with almost no clothes on you is not a smart idea.
2. Set up the profile
What name are you going to choose for your channel? You can go with your own name, but you can also come up with a cool channel name that will grasp its essence. Here are few other things to pay attention to when setting up the channel:
- Provide your bio in the About section and explain what this channel is about. Include links to your LinkedIn profile, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages, and your official website if you have one. Yes, you should have your own website if you’re trying to build a brand around your name.
- Play with the settings. YouTube allows you to set the latest video as the one that will be featured on your channel. You can create title and tags for the channel, and you can customize the layout in a way that works for you.
3. Maintain a logical progression
You won’t be publishing random videos on topics that come to your mind. Personal branding is a continuous process.
Mia Forbes Pirie, who we mentioned above, uses YouTube for publishing short videos as part of her training programs. The subscribers get email messages with private links to weekly videos. Many coaches use the same technique: they develop programs and promote the videos in a logical progression. You’ll find playlists and you can spend hours watching them.
Learn from this example! When you’re focused on building a personal brand, think about consistency and logical progression all the time. Create playlists and invite your viewers to take a look at other useful videos after watching one of them. The more they see of you, the stronger impression they will have of your personal brand.
4. It’s all about branding
Wrtier Roberta Collins explains that filming videos is not enough. “You need something to be recognized by. An intro is a must. If you take a look at some of the most popular channels on YouTube, like TED for instance, you’ll notice they start with a recognizable intro. Do the same thing for your videos. Needless to say, you should hire someone to edit the material in the most professional way if you don’t have the skills for that. You want a short, snappy intro and videos that are right on point.”
In addition to the intro, you need other details that will help you build a personal brand through YouTube videos. Your style is important. The way you talk and the humor you use, the unusual topics you cover… all these things are part of your brand. Think of an unusual twist that makes you different from the competition.
5. Be consistent!
People won’t subscribe to your channel because of a single cool video. They want to see more content, so they will know you have great things to offer. Then, YouTube will keep suggesting your latest videos to the subscribers, so you’ll have a constant audience that’s counting on you.
Make a video publishing schedule and stay true to it. The more content you provide, the stronger your personal brand becomes.
Filming videos is scary. It’s like revealing your weakest points to a huge audience. However, it’s also an incredible experience that puts you in front of a never-ending flow of feedback. Learn from it. Grow!
