Teaching Moment: Social Media Branding

This is an overview of the presentation about Social Media Branding Zach Gregg and I created.

“What’s your brand?”

This is something a lot of people are hearing more often. There’s a way we should be presenting ourselves online whether it’s for your career or as a personal choice, there is something that can uniquely identify ourselves.

Why should we brand ourselves though? From our professor’s book, he shared that branding shows our audiences who we are. It’s a chance to show others who we want to be. 

In my class this past week, my partner Zach Gregg and I discussed social media branding. We first asked the class, “How easy was it for you to brand yourself?” 

At the beginning of the course, we were tasked with finding a beat and restructuring our social media platforms. Some didn’t have any problem finding their niche, but others felt confined by branding themselves and felt like they could only discuss one thing. 

This is where the 80/20 rule comes into play. As we continue to grow as journalists, 80 percent of our posts -- whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn -- will be professional, but the 20 percent is a chance to showcase our personality. 

It’s important to remember that our audience is coming to us for a specific reason. We are delivering to them, but every so often, it’s OK to show your personality.

With branding, it's important to know how to present yourself on different platforms while keeping a consistent message about who you are.

We chose three anchors -- two in South Florida and one in Colorado -- to examine and see how they brand themselves on social media.

Each anchor, Jacey Birch, Rudabeh Shahbazi and Kyle Clark, has a specific brand that we wanted to share with the class. 

We examined Birch’s profile first. Majority of her posts are sharing news articles from her station or outfit and shoe pictures. Although it appears that the 80/20 rule is working for her, a majority of her engagement is coming from her outfit of the day and shoe pictures. 

What Zach and I noticed is that there isn’t any social media optimization in her new article posts which also contributes to a lack of engagement. Another thing we noticed, her brand seems to be more focused on her OOTDs rather than the news she is reporting on.   

Then we looked at Shahbazi’s profile. She has roughly the same amount of followers as Birch and works in the same area. She tends to optimize all of her posts whether they are about the news or anything personal, and a majority of the time, her engagement is pretty high.

Lastly, we looked at Clark’s profile. We found he brands himself well as an evening news anchor. He adds his personality into a lot of the work and content that he produces online, but it works for him! 

Each anchor provided us with a different sense of how people in this industry are working on their brand. This is something to take into consideration and prepare for now and beyond as we continue to develop our brand and beat as a journalist. 

So what do you think of these three profiles? Each are very different, but does their brand and content work for them as a journalist?