Social media has over 3.6 billion monthly active users in 2021. That means about half of the human population is using social accounts in their daily lives. People use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to reach out to their old friends and catch up on the current trends. 

Instagram, the second most popular social platform worldwide, is perfect for showcasing life through beautifully captured pictures. In fact, this platform is designed to share images that attract users to follow one particular account. 

When individuals or organisations provide great content with visually pleasing posts, it’s no wonder they grab a number of followers on their accounts. Since having massive followers can mean having a great influence, many business accounts (including those of B2Bs) try to get as many likes and follows as possible to broaden their reach. 

However, Instagram isn’t only a place for business accounts to flourish. You can also leverage this social media platform to build personal branding for yourself and by proxy your small business.

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding affects the way that people perceive you. In general, your personal branding is made up of three major points: your skills, experience, and personality. These elements reflect who you are as a person or a brand, in both online and offline worlds.  

Building personal branding is an ongoing, lifetime process. Your words and actions will contribute to making the brand you want to show to the world. While all these elements can be seen clearly offline and in person, showing your story through an online platform is an entirely different matter.

Getting a social media handle plays a vital role in showing off your personality. With Instagram, for example, you can let people see what you do, and share your thoughts through your posts. 

You can share with the world the things you want them to know. By making engaging content that explains your brand or you as a person, people can understand and learn more about you, and build a positive perception. 

How to Get Your Personal Brand All Out on Instagram

Instagram is all about making beautiful content and getting followers. While followers often don’t define a person or brand in general, it’s still important to know the power accounts with large followings hold. Having a significant number of followers often means that an individual or organisation has successfully created impactful branding.

So, if you want to build a persona from scratch, here are some tips for you in creating your personal branding on Instagram. 

1. Determine Your Ultimate Goal

Before putting effort into creating your persona, you need to know what your ultimate goal is. Understand what you’re going to offer to your target audience—for example, is it your expertise or personality? When you have this clear, it’s easier to determine your content. 

You will then need to research your niche whether it fits your goal or fills up the current demand. Researching your competitors can help you analyze what types of content gains popularity and draws attention. 

Although strictly there’s no right or wrong when building your personal branding, understanding what makes people love an account will give you a better insight. After that, you can begin building your persona and consider your strategy to determine how you post in the future. 

2. Curate Your Content

When you decide to improve or build personal branding from scratch, you may be worried about old posts on your Instagram account. However, you don’t need to delete every post to make your new ones look attractive. With the archive feature, you can still keep your old photos but hide them, to curate your feed while enhancing your profile. 

This content curation works best when you want to showcase interesting posts to capture your audience’s attention. However, this doesn’t always mean just deleting every mismatch or old piece of content you have on your account. Curating content means that you provide orderly posts that, in the end, will create an attractive-looking page for new visitors. 

3. Match Your Visual Branding Element

When you’re looking at how attractive an Instagram page is, you probably consider how relevant the content is to its main theme. For example, Instagram beauty and wellness brands make a great impact when they set their content according to a specific theme, color, or background. This alone makes a visually pleasing page for visitors.

For your own page, you can create a particular theme for each post. This might be adding a background that does not distract from your picture, using the same filter for the entire post, or choosing complimentary colors because it matches your brand identity.

Creating content consistency on Instagram is key, and meaningful to followers because it takes time and effort to do so. In short, understand what you’re going to share with your followers and decide the best visual elements to include in your post. 

4. Be Consistent With Your Post

It’s important to post consistently on your Instagram. Having regular content on your platform will increase your discoverability and expose your brand to a new audience. 

This part can be hard for some people, because creating and developing new content takes time. However, this effort will be worth it, and  it shows that you’re serious about building your personal branding. 

Take an example from a great influencer, Nuseir Yassin (also known as Nas Daily). He’s known for posting unique content, eye-opening thoughts, and interesting facts. Nas is very consistent in posting new content on his social media handle, and his posts appear regularly in feeds and follow suggestions.

His consistency draws attention around the globe, with his content reaching a range of countries and getting him a massive number of followers. This type of consistently helps create strong personal branding even faster. 

5. Be Authentic 

Last but not least, being your true self is key to great personal branding on Instagram. Ok, so you can fake yourself and make up a persona that people will love. Or create something for the sake of getting attention. But this isn’t viable long term.

The thing is that personal branding lasts for a long time. When people first get to know you from your content, they will most likely remember you and build their perception of who you are from it. So, when you create a fake persona around yourself, it will be attached to you forever. 

That’s why it’s crucial to be genuine and authentic when building your personal branding. Since you’ll live with it on a daily basis, you should only make posts that resonate with you as well as your intended audience, and represent you in the best light. 

Wrapping Up

Personal branding is the process of building an online presence that connects people to you personally, and not just your business and what you do. 

Building a following on Instagram can be difficult, because so many other brands compete for attention in this crowded space. It takes time to build up momentum with followers and likes, but it’s worth the effort if you want you (and your business brand) to stand out from the crowd. 

Always remember, when posting photos or videos on Instagram, it’s crucial to keep them relevant and valuable to your audience. Each post should convey something about who you are as a person or brand and how you provide value through your products or services. 

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Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).

Twitter: @breadnbeyond

Email: andre@breadnbeyond.com 

LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro