Branding

*"It is not trapping yourself in a box, it's identifying the box you're already in."¹*

**Why should you do branding?**

Branding helps people to find and recognize you. Knowing your brand and caring for it will help you to organize your content and your presentation in a unique and likable way. It gives your marketing effort personality and makes it more likable. And for that, you don't even need a logo or cool slogan.

**How to start your branding.?**¹

The first thing to do is to figure out what you like.

The first thing you can do is to work on your profile pictures and banners. Keep in mind that branding is a continuous process, always build and improve on it, even when you have your first parts in place.

Make sure your pages are presentable and inviting. Free them from unnecessary clutter and keep them up to date.

And finally, Ask yourself: would you follow yourself?

**A way of getting started in practice could be:**

Make a list with pictures of all the stuff you like and did. Look for similarities and take some time to think about why you liked them, there will be a lot of clues on what your brand could be.

The first practical thing you can do is to unify your banner and profile pictures on all social media channels.

As a comic artist, you could draw yourself in your style and have a speech bubble as background stating something personal about you.

If you are doing a campaign for a project or a game, take the main character as a profile picture, and his home or a picture of him with his friends and foes as a banner. If there is already a UI you can use that as a template to frame pictures that are not game play to unify the look on your feed

If you are a programmer, and you don't have visually interesting stuff going on, take pictures of yourself and your surrounding. Include stuff you like. If Carnivora plants are your thing, make sure they are on most of your pictures.

There are many ways to combine banner and profile picture interestingly. If you are lacking ideas, just go online and look at the profiles of people that resonate with you. How are they doing their branding? What do they do appear interesting and personal? What is that you like about it?

Once you got your basics in place, you can start to think about how to present your content? Do want to create a specific vibe? Maybe you want to give your visitors the feeling that they listen to a person living in a peaceful village or that they witness the mind of personality that is obsessed with crazy intriguing and disgusting but genius thoughts. Give your posts some kind of framing and reflect on the way on how you use language and color pallets in your images. That is equally important for a Programmer as well as for an artist. That process will always be ongoing and should reflect aspects of your true personality.

To ensure that your pages are inviting even if your content is disgusting horror photos, make sure that people will find what they are looking for in a high density. Nobody wants to see the same content 3 times in a row, even so, it makes sense to retweet your posts according to the optimal time frames for posting around the world

Revisit your page and imagine being a potential follower. Would you like the page? Do you get what the branding promises? Would you follow yourself?

And remember, branding is about consistency!

**Some Tips:**¹

Make sure your profile picture is easy to understand, even when it is very small.

Find a color scheme that suits you. If you have no idea about color theory, just google for "color palette" and you will find plenty of examples and generators to look into.

If you have your branding together, stick to it for a while.

If you change your branding, only change one thing at a time and give your audience the time to get used to it.

Always have contact information in your bio.

Never put "Aspiring" in your bio.

Have your pinned post with content that matches your brand.

The golden rule: Have fun with it.

¹Megan Mccurdy during the Social Media Fight club Session on the 24.01.2021 https://twitter.com/Megcurdy