Marketing 101: building a personal brand

- what does personal brand mean
- why should you care
- how to distinguish it against the company you work for
- how to do it w/ support from your boss
- how to build yours

A thread 🧵

Personal brand has a negative stigma in some circles.

Personal brand does NOT mean you are a self centered narcissist.

Personal branding is intentional use of your time, voice, channel and platforms.
Why intentionality is important:

How you invest your time = How you will spend your life

Social media can become passive and addicting without true meaning and intention.

Don’t waste your life reading other people’s highlight reel, make your own.
Being a creator > being a consumer
How can you be intentional?

Similar to building a brand strategy: know what you stand for as a person

What lights you up? (Your mission)
What value do you want to bring to the table? (Value props)
How do you deliver it? (Voice and tone)

Reminder on brand strategy 101 ⬇️ https://t.co/ZpqfEU4XEh
Come up with content pillars.

You can stray from these but this is the core of what you talk about.

For me, everything I do relates to 1 of 4 things:
1. Empowering and helping women
2. Building companies
3. The ups and downs of parenting
4. Marketing
Your foundation audience is everything.

Who you build your brand with will dictate how your content pillars will perform.

Thirst traps grow your audience faster (IG algorithms love a thirsty photo) but your audience won’t be engaging with the content you want to post.
Channel strategy

Just like brands, you can’t be everything to everyone, everywhere.

Decide where you will invest your time based on the above decisions (your content, audience, form of delivery)
Give yourself milestones.

This seems silly for personal channels but it goes back to intentionality.

I started my twitter journey with a goal of tweeting 3-5 times a day.
Your day job vs. Your personal brand

these are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the best brands encourage the individual nature of the person w/ the mission of the co (hello @morningbrew @AviationGin )

The holy grail is when your company aligns with your personal mission. 🔥
How do you start?

Be up front / honest with your boss. An increase in SM presence can cause an eyebrow raise.

Share the why, how and “what’s in it for them” https://t.co/j1UbPJsN14
Last but not least: Just start

Your personal brand grows with you. No one started out with 1m followers and perfect thumbnails and tweet threads.

Try, learn, try again.
What do you think?

Are you being more intentional about your personal SM in 2020?

Would love to hear!

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MDZS is laden with buddhist references. As a South Asian person, and history buff, it is so interesting to see how Buddhism, which originated from India, migrated, flourished & changed in the context of China. Here's some research (🙏🏼 @starkjeon for CN insight + citations)

1. LWJ’s sword Bichen ‘is likely an abbreviation for the term 躲避红尘 (duǒ bì hóng chén), which can be translated as such: 躲避: shunning or hiding away from 红尘 (worldly affairs; which is a buddhist teaching.) (
https://t.co/zF65W3roJe) (abbrev. TWX)

2. Sandu (三 毒), Jiang Cheng’s sword, refers to the three poisons (triviṣa) in Buddhism; desire (kāma-taṇhā), delusion (bhava-taṇhā) and hatred (vibhava-taṇhā).

These 3 poisons represent the roots of craving (tanha) and are the cause of Dukkha (suffering, pain) and thus result in rebirth.

Interesting that MXTX used this name for one of the characters who suffers, arguably, the worst of these three emotions.

3. The Qian kun purse “乾坤袋 (qián kūn dài) – can be called “Heaven and Earth” Pouch. In Buddhism, Maitreya (मैत्रेय) owns this to store items. It was believed that there was a mythical space inside the bag that could absorb the world.” (TWX)