Did you like the pun in the title?
Amidst this past month, I’ve been trying to discover what works best for me as a writer in terms of understanding how brand awareness would work for me. Knowing that social media and writing is often a push and pull dynamic since people don’t want to “read” when they look at a post, it’s difficult to narrow down the tools needed to use. However, only one form of social media marketing seems to efficient in building the credibility and awareness to gain a following, and that’s with microblogging.
Microblogging is a concept utilized best with Twitter; it’s just the simple post, engage, and repeat, but it’s effective, especially with the current generation. In terms of who my audience is, it would most likely concern a majority of those who are closer to me in age or perhaps a generation before; most of my following and followers reflect this notion. Either way, Twitter is often known as a platform where you have to understand the way to effectively communicate to your ‘circle’ on the application, or you will lose your credibility and be shunned.
In the end, microblogging is the most effective for brand awareness due to it forcing you to have the confidence to engage with your audience actively in order to not lose relevance, as well as being confident in your professional brand image. For the writing community, there isn’t one set image. You can be whoever you want to be as long as it is reflective of you and the type of brand you’re promoting; it’s essential to be creative with it as well. From the types of writer microbloggers that I see, often times their professional brand is mixed with their personal images in order to promote authenticity and a certain lightheartedness. For writers, you don’t necessarily get to see their personalities whether it’s with fiction, poetry, or journalism; you get to see a reflection of their style or voice in an article or piece of fiction – not the writer themselves, so this is an act of connecting with your audience that I find helpful.
Here, you can see the type of music that I listen to with the lyrics to Solange’s “Binz” in the profile description next to my age, and my followers have access to my online book series through Issuu.com. This mixture of professionalism and personal branding that works best in building a steady engagement; through this, posting articles or retweeting other articles is met with exceptional responses that isn’t like interruptive advertising in the way unwanted posts could disrupt someone’s feed. This is something that’s widely known of my profile, and through this exercise, I discovered the way the amplify the power of microblogging to almost its fullest potential.
Through this blogging exercise, I’ve found myself with a better understanding and insight to the types of social media profiles I surround myself around and how that reflects me. Even with something as little as following blogs with similar professional brands to yours makes a difference than the standard people that you know. It’s never to early to begin building your professional brand despite whether you have a job or in school where it wouldn’t affect you. Social media is a reflection of the type of person that we are trying to be, so it’s probably the write time to get into building your brand.
Taheera's Blog 