Taking Your Place In The Circle Of Life

I've just come back from an hour-long walk and boy was that needed! It's been a rather busy day today since my usual early start, between admin and project planning, I've been stuck on my seat all day. Before I went on a walk though, I did have three consultations back to back. As you will know, consultations are my favourite part of the day. Although my clients were statistically very different, they all essentially wanted to know the same thing: how do you build your brand on social media? Now this is something I've talked extensively about over the past few years and have done webinars, panel sessions and group consultations exploring the key concepts of this. However, I mainly speak about this from a theoretical standpoint. Today, I want to share with you the three practical steps that changed things for me and my personal brand.

👉🏾 Call yourself what you want others to call you

If you look over on my Twitter, you'll see that my username is 'Creative Coach' and it's been that way for about about a year now. This wasn't necessarily a title that I had earned or that someone had given me, but it was the name that I wanted to be known as. This was an intentional move because I wanted people to know that this is what I do. More to this though, if you've ever received a message from me it more than likely will have had 'BB🔆' at the end. It drove my friends crazy during uni because I used to put it after every single message that I sent to them! 'BB' is simply the initials of my name, "Bolu Bello", however, I adopted 'BB🔆' specifically for my personal brand because I felt it was professional with an added little pop of colour - just like me! It's now graduated to 'BB 🧠' and that's what you'll see about me everywhere.

👉🏾 Tighten up your bio

My bio used to look like my CV. Everything and anything that I was doing was listed there for the whole world to see. I guess this was partly because I was proud of everything I was achieving back then because it made me look important. But as I developed and began refining my personal brand, it became very clear that a CV bio was not going to attract the sort of clientele that I was after. It was my branding guy that put me onto this. He kept on asking me over and over the value that I bring to my potential customer. I was real angry with him at the time because as I would begin explaining it, he would shout 'boring' or 'STOP' or 'why should I care?' (my FAVOURITE question these days). He was right though. The only thing that your customer or audience really care about is what value you can bring to them. They only care about you as far as what you can do for them- as terrible as that sounds. So, he made me write out sentences. I wrote almost 20 before his said that I had a passable one- passable. He taught me to write a bio full of the value fat, neglecting the trimmings for later, so people know what I'm about, straight off the bat. So today, when people tell me that they've stylised their bios after my own and seen results- I'm not shocked at all!

👉🏾 Build content pillars

The reason I put out content all the time is because I'm working hard to establish myself as an authority in my field. But this content doesn't just come from nowhere. I've mentioned it before, but I have content pillars that I use to constantly draw content from so I don't dry out. The best thing about this, when it comes to your positioning, is that it's the content you put out that people will know you for. For example, we know the football girls and boys because we see their content every time a match is on. We also know those who are obsessed with interior design...because they post about. We also know who the comedians are, who aways seem to be putting out content just at the right time. They put out that content because they are passionate about it and in return that's what they get known for. So, you need to ensure that your content aligns with the brand you want to be/have.

These are the three practical things I've done and, well, the proof is in the pudding! Are you ready to take your place and finally be the star?