The Wrong Way to Brand Yourself on Facebook and Twitter

by Rosetta Thurman

category: Personal Branding

Published October 21, 2009 @ 03:24PM PT

I've written quite a bit about personal branding on this blog, and I'm happy to see that in the social media space, I'm starting to see more and more young professionals sharing their interests in the nonprofit sector. On Facebook and Twitter, young nonprofit workers are making connections with each other and posting resources and information online. If you're reading this, I hope you at least have a Facebook account. I'll give you a late pass if you're not on Twitter yet, but you'll need to hurry up and read my post on how young professionals can get started using Twitter. Social media can be important tool for building your professional reputation, but only if you do it right. Are you branding yourself the wrong way?

Do You Post Negative Messages...All the Time?

It's cool to find other people you can commiserate with online. That's the beauty of having such a diverse community on the Internetz. But, after a while, it gets old for your friends and followers to read how messed up your life is. Everyone has their bad days, but if all day long you're posting negative updates, it's unlikely that people will want to listen to you on the off chance that you DO have something brilliant to say or some useful resource to share. True story: I am Facebook friends with someone who works for an awesome organization. But all she ever posts is miserable status messages. All day long, she's "having a bad day at work" or "can't sleep tonight" or "wish I could have fun this weekend, but I have to work" or "need some sleep, I'm so tired" or "work, work, and more work" and so on. Very rarely does she post anything informative or inspiring. So I hid her updates. I was getting depressed just reading them.

Have You Been Oversharing a Bit Too Much?

My viewpoint on being professional vs. personal online is that you have to share things from your personal life in order to make it easier for people to trust you in professional life. You have to stop trying to be two different people. I've also written about how the power of the overshare can help you connect with others in the workplace. But, like with all things, too much can actually be a bad thing. If you want to maintain some semblance of privacy in terms of your future boss knowing certain things about you that could be used against you later, I wouldn't post anything like this:

Are You Posting Anything Useful Related to the Nonprofit World?

It's really hard to build a strong personal brand for yourself if you never talk about your skills, experiences, and what you know about the field in which you work. If you're on Facebook or Twitter, you should be posting links to different events your nonprofit is hosting, or news items about nonprofits, volunteerism, or philanthropy. You could even share articles written about your organization, community, or clients. Your status messages should show not only that you have a glowing personality, but that you know your stuff and you're on top of what's happening in the nonprofit arena. People will begin to respect your wealth of knowledge and come to know you as an expert, not just someone who's taking her dog for a walk and about to eat Cheerios for dinner.

If you don't care about your online presence, throw my advice out the window. But if you want to build a strong personal brand to enhance your nonprofit career, you should think through how you want to be perceived before you post that next tweet. What have your experiences been in building a name for yourself through social media?

Photo credit: Wikimedia.org