In case you make an Instagram Story and want it to be available for your followers for more than 24 hours, but still don’t want to make a whole post about it, you can use the “Highlight” feature. After your Story is up, if you view it, you can see that there is a small heart icon at the bottom right corner: that is the Highlight button. When you click it, you add a row of Stories between your bio and your posts, which you can organize by categories and which will be available for your followers to view until you choose to not have it highlighted anymore.
Instagram Stories Statistics from 2017 and 2018
500 million people on Instagram use Instagram Stories daily (Instagram Stories Ads, 2019).
The most used filter on Instagram Stories was the one called “Heart Eyes” and the most used GIF was the one called “Heart Love Sticker” (Instagram Year in Review 2018, 2018).
15% to 25% of the users who view stories click the “Learn more” option on Story Ads (Slichnyi, 2018).
In 2017, a third of the most viewed Stories were posted by businesses and one fifth resulted in a DM from an Instagram user (Bojkov , 2019).
Personal Branding on Instagram Stories in 2019
Investing on Instagram Stories can potentially be a great way of leveraging your Instagram account: it is fast, easy content and you can get really creative with it. Plus, it does not always have to be as perfect as an Instagram post, so it may even mean less work for you.
Show exclusive content
An example of exclusive would be the behind-the-scenes of what you do. Those who are interested in your final product will probably also be interested in the process of making it. Moreover, this is an opportunity to show your expertise and hard work. You can do it by posting a series of video stories or by doing a livestream. People don’t expect the Stories to be as “perfect” as the posts, so don’t be afraid of being real.
Use stories to make small announcements
If you decide to organize a contest, if you are going somewhere and you would like to meet up with people in your niche, if you are going to be at a certain event or if you are nominated for some sort of award. You can make whole posts about this type of things, but posting a Story is also a great way of talking about it. It is a little bit more human and you don’t have to edit yourself as much.
Create a row of highlights
Highlighting some of your best stories makes a great little extra on your profile. You can organize it by category and put a little cover on each one, so that it looks better (you can use the Canva app to easily make these covers). For example, if you are a travel blogger, you can make one highlight grouping for each country or continent you visit and you can have each cover with the respective flag.
Ask questions
With stickers specifically developed to ask questions and make polls, it would be silly not to make the most of it, especially if one of your main goals on Instagram is to grow your network. People like sharing their opinions and it is always a plus if they feel like your Instagram is not 100% about you, but that you also want to listen to what they have to say.
Chapter 7: Facebook
The technology giant; probably the first one that comes to mind when we talk about social media. The number and variety of features on Facebook seems to be never ending and sometimes it is hard to keep up. However, there are some basics that can definitely be useful to grow your personal brand and, when big updates happen, everyone ends up knowing about it, either because Facebook lets its users know or because it becomes a conversation topic. So you don’t need to be a Facebook pro to make the most of it, you just need to keep an eye open for new updates that can be interesting for you to explore.
Personal Profile vs. Business Page
For your personal brand, you can choose between a Profile or a Facebook Page. A Profile has a limit of how many people can connect with you (although once your friend limit is reached, people can choose to “Follow” you), but it also makes it easier for you to control who is in your little Facebook networking circle and it gives a more human feel to your brand. With a Facebook Page you don’t have that much control: once someone likes your page, they become your follower and you don’t have a say about it, unless you end up blocking them, but that will probably only happen if that specific follower causes any problems on your profile. However, less control also (and the fact that there is no limit to the number of people who can’t connect with you) means that your reach potential is a lot bigger.
So, choosing between these two is a matter of you weighing in what you can do with each. And if you cannot choose, you can even have both and tailor it to different audiences within the same audience: for instance, you can have your Profile for people in the industry who you know and that you meet along the way, and the Page for other people who are interested but who you don’t actually know. Just make sure that the two are consistent: you are still the same person managing and posting on both.
If you opt for a Profile, you can turn your current one into a Personal Branding one or you can create a second account solely for branding purposes, by following the same steps you did to create your personal one. One thing you should pay special attention to with a Profile is the privacy settings of each of your posts. I will go into more detail about privacy in a few paragraphs.
A Facebook Page is like a profile, but instead of it being personal and only for people you know, it is public, anyone can follow it and you use use it to show your brand. When you create a Page, you can choose between two types: Business or Brand (for business pages) and Community or Public (for non-business pages, such as a fan account). After you choose one of those, you will need to put in your Page Name (choose wisely because you will not be able to change it), to select a Category and, in some cases, to add your address and/or your phone number.
Afterwards, Facebook will give you the chance to add your Page’s profile and cover photos or videos, but if you don’t have them at that point, you can skip these steps. And that is it, your page is created. But of course, there is a lot more to edit and add.
Username: that will be at the end of your page’s URL and will make it easier for people to find you.
Page Info: start date and business type.
CTA: related to your business (so if you had a restaurant, for example, you could choose the one to make a booking).
Interests
More info: release date, about, biography, awards, gender, menu (in case of restaurants) and more.
Story: like a blog post about your brand’s story, that can also have a cover photo.
Team members: where you can add your personal profile, if you would like.
Services
Community: in case you also have a Facebook group related to your brand.
Facebook Pages have 10 templates available (Shopping, Business, Venues, Movies, Nonprofit, Politicians, Services, Restaurants & Cafes, Video Page and Standard), that automatically customize certain details of your page accordingly. When your profile is all prepared, with all the important info and visuals, you are ready to start posting and your posts can be organic or promoted. In terms of engagement and interactions, people can like, comment and share your posts, talk to you privately on Messenger and leave reviews.
Just like on Instagram, here too you can post Stories, but this functionality is not nearly as popular and used on Facebook. When you post a Story on Instagram, there is an option to also share it on Facebook, so you can keep your Facebook Stories active with zero extra work.
Facebook Statistics from 2018
Facebook has almost 1.5 billion active daily users on mobile, and 2.32 overall (Ahlgren, 2019).
85% of the people who have a smartphone use the Facebook app (Ahlgren, 2019).
In May of 2018, there were 80 million Facebook Pages (Ahlgren, 2019).
Every minute, 400 people start a Facebook account (Ahlgren, 2019).
The age group that uses Facebook the most is between 25 and 34 (25%) (Top 20 Facebook Statistics – Updated March
2019, 2019).
Every minute, there are 4 million likes happening on Facebook (Ahlgren, 2019).
The organic reach of a post is 6.4% of the page’s followers (Bain, 2019), and the number has been decreasing continuously.
Videos get an average engagement rate of 6.01% (Cooper, 2018).
150 million users were using Facebook Stories in 2018 (Cooper, 2018)..
Personal Branding on Facebook in 2019
Facebook is that one social platform that you just cannot ignore - after reading those statistics you probably understand why. Naturally, the strategy you should opt for depends on why you are using Facebook. These tips, for instance, are useful for those using Facebook for Personal Branding.
Fill in all the relevant information
Facebook has so many different fields in the “About” section, that you need to make the most of them to be in control of what you want the people to know about you and to promote your personal brand as you want. Things like your education, your professional experience, any certifications or awards you have won: people might try and look that up online and nothing is more reliable than the information available on your own profile or page. Most people are curious and they will end up clicking on the “About” section on your profile, so don’t disappoint them. And don’t forget to keep updating it as your career grows, of course.
Besides this, you should have at least one contact for anyone who might want to chat with you (one that you actually use - if someone tries to get in touch and simply gets ignored, they will build an unfavorable image of you. That is as easy to avoid as having an email address solely for contact inquiries and making sure you get notifications from new emails). You might think this is not that important, because if people want to talk to you they can just send you a message through Facebook Messenger. Sure, you might be right and never get an email from a Facebook contact, but that is the kind of thinking that might make you lose interesting opportunities. Remember that a lot of personal branding relies on networking, so you should not miss any potential opportunity to meet new people in your industry.
If you are using a Personal Profile, pay attention to your privacy settings
Pages are inherently public, so if you are using one to promote your personal brand, you don’t need to worry about privacy settings. However, that is not the case with Personal Profiles. You can manage these settings on two levels: your whole profile and each post.
Profile Privacy Settings
Go on your profile’s settings and choose “Privacy,” from the list of options on the left. There you will find a few privacy settings and tools and below I will list the ones you should pay attention to. These will be the standard settings for anything you do on your profile:
Your Activity
“Who can see your future posts?” - Here you should choose the “Friends” option, so that the content you post is exclusive for your Facebook community. You might be wondering what would lead people to send you a friend request if they cannot see anything you post beforehand, but remember that these are the standard settings. Soon we will see the privacy settings for each post, which you can strategically use to have some teasers posts, that will make the right people want to know more and, hopefully, want to add you to their network.
“Review all your posts and things you’re tagged in” - For safety reasons, you should activate the option to manually review everything you are tagged in. Just in case you get tagged in spam posts or a friend confuses this profile for your actual personal one and tags you in a photo from last weekend’s wild night. This way you are 100% in control of what can and cannot appear in your profile.
How People Find and Contact You
“Who can send you friend requests?” - Set this to “Everyone” and then decide who you want to accept or not as your Facebook friend. There are spam accounts and trolls on Facebook, which you will not want in your online network.
“Who can look you up using the email address you provided?” and “Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?” - You will want to be found by relevant people, so definitely set both of these to “Everyone.” You will probably give out your email and your phone number in several occasions and people might use those contacts to try and find you online.
“Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?” - This is a no-brainer: you definitely do. Someone might have heard your name and a little bit about yourself and got an interest in what you do, so they try to google your name and boom, there it is, your own Facebook page, where they can find out more about you and even contact you. It is a winning situation for both people!
Besides this, everytime you post something, you can choose the privacy settings for that specific post. Before you hit “Share,” click on the scroll down options next to “News Feed” right below what you have just written. Go for:
Public, for those teaser posts I have mentioned before. If you believe a post could make a person want to connect with you, and if is not too exclusive, make the post public (i.e., anyone on or off Facebook can see it). Something like a contest you will be organizing or an event you will be speaking at can be good posts to have as public.
Friends, for all the other posts. People sent you a friend request to see valuable, interesting content, so that is what you you should strive to give them.
Friends except…, just in case you don’t want a specific friend (or list of friends) to see a post.
Share your expertise
Unlike Instagram, Facebook is not inherently visual; it also includes quite a bit of text. Now, that does not mean that posting mostly text is the way to go: if you want to achieve the best possible results, you should accompany your text with good visuals (more on that on the next section). But since you can share a lot more words on Facebook, it is a great chance to show your knowledge to your followers in more detail.
If you have a blog, for instance, you should always share a link to your new blog posts. If you were interviewed or had a guest post somewhere, you should do the same thing. See, the actual long content is not on Facebook, but since it is so easy to share posts like this on the platform, it is definitely something you should not ignore. People who are interested in what you have to say will click, especially if your post has a good, compelling copy and if the snippet shows optimization for social media sharing.
Post with good quality and consistent imagery
You should do this for every visual piece you use:
Profile picture: besides the usual quality standards, make sure you use a photo with the right dimensions that, in this case, are 2048 pixels by 2048 pixels (remember that, even though you will upload a square image, Facebook will crop it into a circle).
You should give out a professional and trustworthy vibe, which can mean different things for different industries and niches -- it does not necessarily need to be you in a suit or a work dress. If you want to establish yourself as a fitness expert, for example, you should have a picture of yourself wearing good quality fitness attire. You can even hire a professional photographer or ask a photographer friend to take these photos for you. If you cannot afford the first one and don’t have the second one, my tip is that you go on entrepreneur and freelancing related Facebook groups and ask if there is any photographer in your area who would like to do a service swap: in this case, a photography session for a workout session would be a great offer. You will probably find someone up for it! Both of the parties would benefit from this and it could even be a great opportunity to create some word-of-mouth.
Cover photo: your cover photo can simply be a good photo that relates to your area of expertise, but it can also be a great way of highlighting something you want to announce, like the release of a new product or an event you will be hosting.
If you choose to use your Cover Photos to make announcements, make sure your images have a nice design. If you have the means for it, you can outsource the design of your visuals or you can even make it a one time job, i
f you pay for a template that you can then edit yourself whenever you need to. Otherwise you can use Snappa and make the images yourself. Whatever you choose to post, don’t forget to use the right dimensions: 1640 pixels by 720 pixels.
Post images: these are the images that go with the posts that you make. They can be photos or designed images. What matters for these images is the width, that should be 476 pixels; the height can vary.
One thing to keep in mind is that, if you use text in your design images, you need to remember that a lot of people go on Facebook through their mobile device. So, when it is time to design these visuals, make sure they will be readable even on the phone. In other words, what I am saying is that the font cannot be too small.
Link preview image: when you write a URL in the “What’s on your mind, [insert your name]?” section, a snippet appears and, in that snippet, there should be a horizontally oriented image.
If you are posting a link to your website or blog, you should make sure that all your pages have this image with the optimal dimensions, which are 600 pixels by 314 pixels. You can do this by going on your website’s back office, going to the Edit page of whatever you are trying to share and look for the “Social Media” section. Try and do this whenever you publish a new page on your website and you will not have to worry about it again.
Social Media Marketing Workbook 2019 Page 3