If you wanna go from passive to active in your career, one of the absolute best ways to do that is by using social media to take control of your personal brand. On a heels of a keynote focused on this topic last week, I shared this slide and I got multiple people reaching out asking for me to share this slide and a bit more information about it. So we call this the social hierarchy at Roloff Consulting, and it’s the idea that there are steps that you need to take in order to reach kind of that top Echelon of being a thought leader, but it’s really important for people to recognize that you don’t have to reach all the way to this thought leadership stage before you start to recognize the benefits that come to your career, you really start to see the benefits in this engaging, connecting and foundational stage. So let’s break down what this hierarchy is.
Starting with the foundation, you have to determine how you’re going to use social media as a tool. Every single tool you name, it is not inherently good or bad. It all comes down to how the person that’s wielding the tool uses it.
I’m sure from time to time, we’ve all had the feeling that social media is maybe controlling us more than we’re controlling it. So it’s really important to do things like set boundaries for yourself on when and how you use social media and making sure that you’re kind of tuning your algorithm from time to time to make sure the right kind of content is showing up on your feed. But beyond tuning that algorithm and making sure that you’re using social media thoughtfully from a consumption standpoint, you also need to start to think through how you’re gonna use the tool to grow your career.
Who are you? What do you wanna be known for? What is your personal brand? In July, we’re gonna have a personal branding workshop that we’re releasing to everybody to allow people to start to work through this foundational item of figuring out exactly what they want their brand to look like.
Once you’ve gotten clear on what you do, who you do it for and how you do it. Then you can move on to this building of a community or really connecting with other people. I have met people from around the world with various types of experiences all through LinkedIn and TikTok. Those people are now friends of mine. There are people that I can call on to happen to their experience and their knowledge as well as continue to learn from day in and day out. And as I add value to that community, they start to reach out to me to help them solve their problems too.
But the adding the value comes in this engaging stage. This is when you start to shift from strictly consuming content to contributing to the discussion. This is where you have the opportunity to really show your competence and explore your own views in your industry. You can do a lot with a really thoughtful commenting strategy. And people seem to think that you absolutely have to go into sharing and leading to start to see the benefits, but I’ve seen so many people build impressive followings from strictly thoughtfully contributing to the conversation. And pretty quickly once you start contributing to comments, the idea of hitting the post button and starting to share your own content is not so intimidating. Of course, I do a lot of video content, but you can do written content. You can use memes or images and infographics. You can curate content from other sources that you find interesting. The possibilities in this sharing category are truthfully almost endless. But you get to that point where you feel comfortable sharing from engaging and connecting and kind of building out that network and that encouragement to continue to share your own ideas. And then finally, if you catch the bug and you really enjoy sharing, you have the opportunity to elevate yourself to a thought leader and truly take control of the conversation.
Not only in the way that it helps you shape your personal brand and your career, but ultimately shapes conversations that are happening across your entire industry, no matter where you are on this hierarchy, if you are looking to take the next step towards really moving from that passive place in your career where it’s happening to you to taking active control over your personal brand and where your career goes.
Consider coming to join us as a part of the catalyst community. To help kickstart the back half of the year, we’re offering a discount to anybody that’s a part of our email list. And if you DM me will give you access to the same code. The most important message here is start building that foundation and moving up this hierarchy as you go, so that you can start to take control of the conversation surrounding you and your personal brand and take your career exactly where you wanna go.