This week in class we talked about branding ourselves and ways to improve our LinkedIn profiles. Like most people I thought why do I need a personal brand? I’m going to be an accountant; does that count as my professional personal brand?

However, I realized it is important to have a personal brand because after all first impressions can lead to lasting impressions. In a world where everyone is a Google search away, your first impression in a professional environment is probably going to be from your online social media profiles, blogs or websites.

Nonetheless, here are some of my takeaways from my experience:

• Thinking about where you want to be in your career in 5 to 10 years. This is helpful because it allows you to start building connections, experience and knowledge that will accumulate with time to help you get to where you want to be.
• Let your personality shine in your writing. I like to think that I am funny so generally I like to add in a bit of humor to my writing. It can of course be risky because it depends on the reader getting the joke as well, but there is always a way to add in a bit of your personality with word choice or even sentence structure.
• Try to be authentic or have “one voice” in all the platforms you choose to use. It can be hard at times, but being consistent is important and you don’t need to be on every single platform. It is much better to choose to be active on a couple.

I read this really interesting article by Ann Friedman where she talks about the challenges of personal branding and her experience with it in an easy to read and relatable way. She talks about the paradox of it all and how in an attempt to brand ourselves we end up carefully constructing an inherently fake persona. I can totally relate to this and I bet many of us can but she also provides a lot of insights in how to brand throughout the article as well. I definitely recommend giving it a read.