Who are you anyway—and what is your brand? What does it stand for?
You might know, but does the rest of the world? Building your brand and communicating it to others doesn’t happen by accident—and it sure doesn’t happen overnight. Knowing this, personal branding expert Gary Vaynerchuk took to LinkedIn workshops recently to share his secrets with the world.
Gary Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur, six-time New York Times bestselling author, CEO of VaynerMedia and VeeFriends, and chairman of Vaynerx. His family immigrated to the United States from Belarus in 1978. In his website bio, he shares that his first experience with business began with selling lemonade at age 7 and baseball cards in high school. He’s come quite a long way since his humble beginnings—and he isn’t afraid to share his secrets.
Whether you’re building a business and hoping to expand your reach or rethinking your branding strategy after decades of success, Vaynerchuk’s words of wisdom are for everyone. Here’s what he recommends.
Decide which platform to focus on
Instead of posting a lot of content across multiple platforms, it’s best to prioritize one outlet.
“Many people here post the same video on every platform and don’t realize that every platform is going to treat that differently,” Vaynerchuk explained in his workshop. “So you’ve got to actually learn the skill.”
Because each platform has its own unique algorithm, a successful approach on one won’t necessarily work on another. When choosing a platform, consider who your audience is and who you would like to interact with your posts. At this point, you can determine which social media platform they are most likely on.
You can also expand your strategy from this point forward. “Personally, I create a ton of content,” Vaynerchuk shared in his content strategy. “I publish a new episode every day on the GaryVee Video Experience, which is distributed on my YouTube channel, Facebook Watch Page and IGTV. I then also have a daily podcast called the GaryVee Audio Experience, which is distributed on my iTunes, Overcast, and Stitcher, amongst some other platforms.”
Vaynerchuk’s content strategy is based on the concept of the “reverse pyramid.” The wider top of the pyramid is his “pillar content” piece, and the narrower bottom is where “micro content” lives. He expands on this concept in a 30-page slide deck, where he also highlights helpful strategies like repurposing a single keynote into many pieces of unique content.
Understand how to measure success
Vaynerchuk also stresses the importance of understanding algorithms. Various components like the thumbnail image, the first few seconds of your video, and the quality of your copy are all key aspects to consider when crafting a post.
When building a successful brand, the overall metric you’ll want to understand is how many people consume your content. Depending on the platform, this could be views or reach. But lately, Vaynerchuk values the number of views his content receives over the number of followers.
“I personally believe the core metric now in the game is views,“ he says. “We’ve gotten away from the first year of social media. In fact, I actually believe the word social media might have to get tweaked. I believe we are now in interest media, not social media…. Social was inherently like, ‘Who is your social network? Who are your friends?’ We are now in an era where what you are interested in is coming to you from the algorithm.”
Grow and build authentic connections
To build your brand, you’ll need to care about and foster relationships with the individuals who are interacting with your content. Once you’ve been authentically yourself and have made connections online, continue growing those relationships through genuine interactions. This can include going live online, hosting live events, or even holding in-person meet ups such as dinners.
“A lot of people don’t realize that they’re one LinkedIn post away from a recruiter or a company seeing them as valuable, which may lead to the opportunity they want,” Vaynerchuk says.
Yet he adds that there’s one thing that can prevent us from fully taking advantage of those potential connections and the resulting opportunities: fear of judgment.
“You post something on LinkedIn, and someone says you’re stupid, and then they clam up—which is devastating to me,“ he explains. “I’m desperately trying to get people out of the insecurity of middle school and high school in professional settings.”
At the same time, it’s important not to go overboard when it comes to making personal connections.
“My toughest challenge was [that] I made a delusional, optimistic ideology that I was going to reply to every person that ever, ever mentioned me in social media,” Vaynerchuk shares. “It was crazy. I actually spent most of 2010–11 going to sleep at 2 a.m. because I would spend [hours] answering everybody on Twitter…. I struggled with letting that go because I felt community building was important…. And so my biggest struggle in building a personal brand was that fateful day in 2011 when I realized the math was beating me and I had to step off that perch that I was standing on for four years.”
You can still start now
Everyone has the opportunity to build their own personal brand at any time and any age.
In his workshop, Vaynerchuk gave the example of someone who, at 47 years old, believes that they have missed their opportunity to play a sport. As one of the most followed influencers on LinkedIn, he speaks words of encouragement: “You haven’t even gone into halftime. It is never too late.”
Photo by Yuri A/Shutterstock.com
