Freberg, Social Media for Strategic Communication, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2019
Chapter 3: Personal and Professional Branding for Social Media
Learning Objectives
● Define personal brand and explain the importance of establishing a community.
● Differentiate the key characteristics of a personal brand.
● Understand the different types of personal brands in social media.
● Discuss the key benefits and challenges of a personal brand.
● Explain the skills needed to create a sustainable personal brand.
Ice Breaker Questions and Exercises
• Ask your students to write down their thoughts on their personal brand. Spend 5 min doing this
and then partner the students with another student. They spend 5 min writing attributes that
represent the other student, and vice versa. Students present the combined personal brand to
the class.
• Crowdsource key characteristics of personal brand to the class. What are some key elements
that need to be considered to have an effective personal brand?
• Evaluate and audit your follower base on Twitter. Use ManageFlitter to evaluate our audience
on Twitter. (https://twitter.com/ManageFlitter). What are some insights you were able to
gather from this audit? What does your follower base tell you and how does it impact your
personal brand? Discuss as a class.
• Have the students research a personal brand as a group and share this with the class. Report key
attributes, brand voice, content that is being shared and created. Examples include
o Jake Paul
o Serena Williams
o Shonduras
o Sue B. Zimmerman
o Shaun Ayala
o Peg Fitzpatrick
o Other (ask the students to vote on who else they would like to look at for personal
branding purposes)
Areas to Cover
• Importance of having a brand voice and personal brand. Establishing a professional digital
footprint is a requirement for today’s social media professionals.
• Social media = front door of your personal brand. First impressions are key.
Multimedia Resources
• Powerful Personal Branding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcr3MshYe3g
Freberg, Social Media for Strategic Communication, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2019
• How to build a personal brand from nothing (Gary Vaynerchuk):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVP7eYBNX4
• How to become KNOWN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNW8edFTeSE)
Additional Materials
• Online Reputation Management (Talkwalker): https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/online-
reputation-management
Assignments and Exercises from Portfolio-Building Activities in Social Media
• Managing Online Reputation Assignment
• Personal Networking Assignment
• Social Coaching Report
• Social Media Certification Audit Assignment
• Social Media Key Topics Tree Exercise