How Feedly Helped Me Define My Personal Brand

Your Business Brand vs. Your Personal Brand

As a solopreneur it can be difficult to determine what you should be posting on social media as your company brand versus what you should be posting as your personal brand. For example, I have Twitter accounts for both BG3 LLC (@BG3LLC) and Cathy Yerges (@CathyYerges). I, like many business owners, struggle between which twitter account I should be interacting on at any given time. Recently, I realized that my personal brand was becoming defined through my consistent use of Feedly.

For those of you who don’t know what Feedly is, it’s a content aggregation system. I use Feedly to find quality content to share on behalf of my clients. As I’m perusing the content feed, I’ll come across a number of articles that I’d like to read. Through a simple process of saving those articles that are of interest to me personally, I’ve been able to discover a steady stream of content to share as my own personal brand.

My personal brand is so much more than what I do in my 9-to-5 work day. It’s what I think about in my community, what I worry about with my children, and the things I struggle with as a business owner. These items are what make me who I am but they’re not necessarily all related to my business. By seeing the various topics that have aggregated in Feedly, I can much better decipher if the content is related to my business and of interest to my audience or of interest to those that follow me personally.

How I Use Feedly

So here is my quick process for using Feedly to curate your personal brand.

• First of all, set up a number of feeds on topics that are of interest to you. These can be things related to your business, industry, household, family, children, lifestyle, hopes and dreams.
• Next, each day go through your feed of new content and identify those articles that catch your attention and that you would like to read. I don’t read them right away. Instead, I click on the save icon in Feedly to gather them all in one spot.

• Next, I take 20 minutes to read through the articles that I have saved. This allows me to:
  1.  Learn from the topics that are being discussed
  2.  Determine which platform they are best to be shared on.
• Then, I use HootSuite to schedule the articles that I find interesting on one or more of my social media accounts.

For example, I recently read an article about networking. As this is a topic that I teach and consult with clients on, it is best shared on my company Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin pages. Right below that in my Feedly feed, I find an article about best tips to making your morning productive. While this may be of interest to my business audience, it is more relevant to those that follow me personally because it points to something that I am personally interested in and working on. So this article gets shared on my personal Twitter account, personal Facebook page and (maybe or maybe not) on my personal LinkedIn page.

The Results

By doing this consistently, I can easily see and differentiate between the brand of my company and my personal brand and it allows me to share quality content with both of my audiences. It also gives people a reason to follow both my personal and business social media accounts. Each account has its own brand and my audience won’t feel like I used the old “bait and switch” by throwing in off-topic content.

Staying consistent with your brand will also allow you to become known as a thought leader in your industry. When people can come to you and find relevant and valuable information related to your topic, it will make them want to come back for more…and bring their friends.

Further reading…Best Practices for Sharing Curated Content