Building and maintaining a personal brand online is important, especially in your professional life. Your personal brand is a combination of your reputation and people’s perceptions of you. You can directly influence how you are perceived by paying close attention to how you behave and interact online.

So how do you influence your online brand?

Social media

In today’s age of social media, it’s highly like that 90% of recruiters will view your social media profiles and factor these in when making a decision about recruiting you. This can work either for or against you, so it’s important to bear this in mind when using social media.

Social media provides a fantastic opportunity to network with like-minded professionals get to know them, which is great for your career development. Seek out key influencers in a given industry and get to know them and engage with them. Find out more about your potential employer’s personal brand by engaging with them on social media.

It’s important to remember that it can also be detrimental to your career advancement if your social media activity doesn’t paint a good picture of you. It’s therefore strongly advisable then to have a separation between your professional and personal social media activity, either by having separate profiles for each or making use of the network’s audience settings tools to limit what is seen publicly.

Your CV
Your CV should be specific and relevant, and always tailored to a particular role. Use it to highlight the key skills and experience you have that make you the best candidate for the role, and remember to inject a bit of personality into your CV to make it more engaging.

Also, it pays to elaborate on key points to prove to the employer that you know how a particular skill or experience is relevant to the job role. It makes for a more engaging read, but also shows that you’ve paid close attention to the job description and know why you’re a good fit for the post.

If you’re posting your CV online, fill it with relevant keywords to help search engines locate it more easily and improve your CV’s search rankings. Randstad Business Support are one of a few online recruitment companies that offer extensive support with CV and overall preparation for candidates.

Your own website

Having your own website is great because it gives you full control over every aspect of its presentation, from content to visual design. It makes you more searchable online too because you’re not part of a social network, and allows you to showcase your skills by using it as an online CV, as well as opening up opportunities to do freelancing work.

As part of your own website, creating a blog is a fantastic way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. If you are producing excellent content specialising on a particular

subject, you will not only increase the amount of traffic coming to your site, but potential employers or clients will be able to identify you as having expertise and will have more confidence in working with you.

With the various tools at your disposal now, you needn’t have any web skills to create a great website in little or no time at all.

A great biography

Having one single source of your own personal biography will be really helpful, and will allow you to use it across multiple platforms without having to rewrite it. The best biographies highlight the best of your own personality, as well as demonstrating to the person who’s reading it that you have the skills they’re looking for.

The key here is writing your bio from the employer’s point of view – what are they looking for? It’s all about answering the questions that the employers will be asking, so keep that in mind as you write. Of course, write it in your own voice as if you were personally telling the recruiter about your biography. You want to convey your own personality to them through the writing, not simply making a list of your qualities or achievements. Keep it interesting, relevant and engaging!

An online business card

Having an online business card can be a really useful tool, and will help you no end, especially if you’re writing a lot of applications. You simply create one golden source of your personal information and include it as a link in all of your application forms or add it into your CV. “About Me” s a great free resource that will give you everything you need.

This has the added bonus of being more searchable online. As you can add links to portfolio pieces and social media sites, it will help you be discovered quickly online.

A great profile photo

Having the best profile photo on your social media platforms and website is a great way to make a striking first impression on potential employers. People will make assumptions based on your appearance in photographs, so investing in a really good portrait that paints you in a great light will do wonders for people taking an interest in your profile.

All of these actions, when done right, will be of great benefit to you and help you in finding your next career move.