Madalyn Sklar

Bringing Personality to Your Social Media

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We often talk about the importance of being authentic and being yourself on social media. It’s great advice. But it’s not always as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, hiding your personality is so much easier than embracing it in all its complexities. That’s ok, though. Humans are complex and we can use our messy, complex selves to build up our brand. How, you ask? We invited marketing consultant Brianne Fleming to talk it out. Here’s a summary of our chat.

Guest: Brianne Fleming
Topic: Bringing personality to your social media
Format: Eight questions directed at the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

Q1: Should you show your personality on social media?

Our guest says, yes. Our personality is what makes us us. When you share your personality on social media, it attracts the right audience to your content. That’s how you’ll find your tribe. That said, though, share only what you’re comfortable sharing. It’s still a public forum, and you don’t want to put yourself in an uncomfortable position.

As Rachel from Express Writers added, sharing your personality helps people get to know you better. Over time, you’ll develop relationships and build your Know, Like, and Trust factors, making you more credible among your audience.

Q2: How can you optimize your bio to showcase your personality more?

Brianne’s top tip is to showcase who you really are as a person. Apart from what you do for a living, also talk about your hobbies, interests, and elements of your personality that people can relate to. For example, our guest loves boy bands and pop culture. And she doesn’t hide it. By sharing that in her bio, she resonates with the millions of people who share the same interests.

Jeremy spoke about the power of using emojis to show your personality. Emojis can convey powerful emotions and feelings in a single character, and so it’s an economical way of conveying your vibe. Whatever tone you’re trying to portray in your bio should also reflect in your profile photo and header image, completing your whole profile.

Of course, a couple of relevant hashtags don’t go amiss either.

Q3: Why are pinned tweets important to establish your personality?

When someone opens your profile, one of the first things they see is your pinned tweet. Make it count. Instead of trying to impress your audience, use that tweet to showcase your personality. Talk about something that makes you relatable to others but also makes you unique. Like a marketing instructor at the University of Florida who likes to chat about boy bands—that’s Brianne, by the way.

As Jim rightly pointed out, your pinned tweet can be an extension of your bio. Use that space to elaborate on what you’ve said in your bio, and you can even use audio/visual elements like a banner image, GIF, or a video to do that.

Q4: Share some tips for choosing your best pinned tweet.

Your primary call to action on Twitter is the follow button. In addition to that, you can also add a web link (your website, newsletter, another social handle) in your bio. So in your pinned tweet, don’t add yet another call to action. Instead, add a tweet that you personally connect to, something that sounds like you.

Madalyn suggested using pinned tweets to showcase your best content. In her case, it’s her latest blog post. This could also be a new video you made or a snappy two-liner about why you like fish fingers and custard. In other words, you want your pinned tweet to give people a good, memorable first impression of you.

Q5: What are some other ways to showcase your personality on Twitter?

Twitter now supports multiple ways of showcasing yourself. As our guest pointed out, apart from text-based tweets, show other sides of yourself as well by participating in Twitter Spaces, sharing videos, and GIFs. These multimedia elements help your audience understand your personality a bit more because they can hear the same weird accent they have or they see that you have a streak of green in your blond hair.

Zen shared a great piece of advice: be interested to become interesting. Most of us often forget to listen because we’re so keen for others to listen to what we have to say. However, people will care about you only when you care about them in the first place. It’s just like real life—be yourself. Take time to engage in genuine conversation with people. Be curious, helpful, and supportive.

Q6: How can you consciously include personality in your social media strategy?

To consciously infuse your personality into your social media strategy, you have to stop yourself from being too conscious. Don’t strive for perfection and overly sterilized content. No one is naturally like that. When you think and edit too much, you tend to strip away the raw beauty of your personality. Catch yourself before you cut out too much.

Chris shared a bunch more ideas, including telling your brand’s story, talking about your team and your employees, keeping the DMs open for your audience and having helpful discussions, and being consistent with your strategy. He also suggested doing whatever Wendy’s does—which is mostly great customer service delivered in a sincere voice. Sound advice.

Q7: Can you still showcase your personality if you’re collaborating with someone else?

Indeed! When you work with someone else, your personality comes through naturally. At the same time, you’ll also be complementing the other party’s personality. When multiple people come together to work on one project, they all bring different things to the table. All of these are important and helpful in their own way. That’s why you should be cautious of people who expect to stifle your personality in a collaboration. After all, we all love stories that have multiple, varying characters. What’s the fun in a book full of robots all the same shape and size and mindset?

As Megan said, if you’re collaborating with someone else on a single brand account—like our chat regulars Charlie Appel Agency and NOW Marketing Group—you can sign off with your name on every tweet. Alyx and Julia do that for the brands they represent respectively.

Q8: Name some do’s and don’ts to consider when establishing your personality.

The most important thing to remember is that you don’t create your personality for your social media. Your personality is who you are offline, before and away from social media. That’s the character you need to channel into your social efforts. You may not appeal to everyone, but you will appeal to the ones that matter. In other words, just be who you are.

Some do’s Jim shared include showcasing your voice and aspects of your personal life. Some of the don’ts include talking about politics and religion (unless that’s your brand) and being salesy.

Alyx added a few more do’s including prioritizing relationships and listening to your instincts, and don’ts such as copying others and doing things that make you uncomfortable.

Well, folks, that’s all from me this week. Thanks so much for reading through, and for more great insights from our chat with Brianne, have a look at this Twitter Moment that Joana put together. And if you have some spare time next Thursday, join us live for our next #TwitterSmarter chat. We’ll be on from 1pm ET. Catch you then!

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About me, Narmadhaa:

I write all the things—technical and marketing copy to fill the pocket; haiku and short stories to fill the soul. A social media enthusiast, I’m a member of the #TwitterSmarter chat crew, and always happy to take on writing gigs.

Say hello: Personal blog | LinkedIn | Twitter

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