Ways you can Improve your Personal Brand :By Understanding Perception.

What are some ways you can improve your personal brand? By understanding perception, using personal presentation and digitising it effectively.

There are many facets to developing your personal brand, but it is important to set the right foundation and this can be done by understanding your authentic self and what you want people's perception of you to be.

Complimentary to this is in developing your personal brand is personal presentation which we wrote an article on with the link below:

Improve your personal brand with personal presentation

Personal presentation is key in improving your personal brand as it is how you convey your unique self to the world.

Affluent CEORaul

In addition one needs to digitise it effectively, we have 2 articles that can give some insight. Firstly, on the 'Importance of quality digital photography' and using LinkedIn as an example on how to setup a social media presence (Note each social media channel works differently and may not have the same audience so you need to research which one is most suitable for you).

The Importance of photography for personal branding

Learn about the importance of personal branding photography for your online presence, and how it can influence first impressions and credibility.

Affluent CEOAffluent CEO

Master Online LinkedIn Personal Branding: Tips & Strategies

Stand out on LinkedIn! Discover tips on building your brand, writing a personal brand statement, and engaging your audience with killer content.

Affluent CEOAffluent CEO

Why I mention the perception and your authentic self separately is because you are reading this article on personal branding with a goal in mind; most likely how to influence or improve the odds of any endeavour you aim to tackle. That is why I feel it is important to first of all discuss perception and how to use its understanding of it in developing your personal brand and then to discuss the importance of authenticity in your personal brand.

To demonstrate the importance of perception when looking at your personal brand I am going to refer to a study carried out by the London School of Economics and University of Zurich where it revealed how Facebook profile pictures provide signals about their background.
In summary, participants were shown a selection of profile pictures, they were 50% more likely to guess someone's background based on whether they had outdoor pictures on their profile. Another takeaway was that if two people were on a similar level, they were more likely to guess successfully.

The importance of this is to understand culture and empathy; ‘the more similar we are, the more information we transmit to each other’. So you have to understand the people you want to present yourself to and how they view things. This form of understanding perception will help you improve your personal brand in crafting your persona.

Why I also want to discuss authenticity in creating your personal brand is for your own self preservation and sanity. There are many people we know that are fantastic at developing their personal brand/personal image like artists, singers, TV personalities, politicians. But sometimes what they are conveying themselves to be is detached from who they really are.

I would not want to advocate for creating your personal brand without having your true self in it as well. Everybody is unique and I think a special element of that personal brand is retaining that authenticity that is you. You don't want to pretend to be someone you are not. I am sure you see a lot of cases of people that do this and it eats them up inside.

I think this opens up some deeper and more profound questions such as if you are developing your personal brand for business or a commercial opportunity and you know you are not that persona, you have to ask why are you doing it? That path might not be the path for you, maybe more the reason to try investigating growing your personal brand.