Do you have a worthwhile online persona?

When starting with a social media or personal branding strategy, one of the first things you should do before creating or optimising your online profiles is to decide on your online persona. Are you going to build your social media strategy around an actual person or use a company name? With this, there is really no right way to build your social identity, but there are a couple of pros and cons to each option that you should research before you decide on which online persona you are going to use.

With the ever-increasing reach of all the social media channels it means that brands and companies cannot afford to make any big mistakes or try and change the direction of the campaign halfway. Find below a couple of tips that can help you with building your online persona.

Brand online persona
The nice thing about building your persona around your brand or company is that there will be no brand confusion. Someone doing a search for your company on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even Google+, fill in behind your company website or blog increasing your online exposure and helping you get good rankings on the SERP’s. Since it is so easy to brand your social media profiles with logos, images, links and short biographies, consumers can trust the company or brand they like on Facebook or follow on Twitter if they would like to connect with you.

The downside of creating a persona around your brand or company is that you might lack some personal elements that people have come to expect from social networking. Transparency plays a big part and you have to be careful that your social profiles doesn’t become purely “marketing” channels that you only use to advertise your services or products. With social media marketing, you have to use a unique personality and it needs to shine through, otherwise you are not going to give anyone a specific reason t o connect with you. Never hide behind a company logo.

Personal online persona
The best part about building a personal social persona for your brand or company using a real person is that it lends more accountability to your social media profiles. Industry leaders and consumers know exactly who they are engaging with on social networks, not just a person without a face. People want to do business with real people, so having a real face and voice for the company goes a long way in building consumer trust.

One of the downsides of relying on a physical person to be the face of your brand’s social media marketing strategy is that if that employee were to ever leave the company, they could take their social media success with them. To give you an example, what if this person had 3000 Twitter followers, most of which was acquired in your social media strategy. If they leave your company, are they going to take that Twitter profile with them? If they do, their goes your Twitter presence and you will have to start again.