Blog vs Social Media: Developing a Personal Brand as a Creative Entrepreneur

Blog vs Social Media: Developing a Personal Brand as a Creative Entrepreneur

As a creative entrepreneur, your brand is big business. Without a personal brand, you're just a faceless entity—which doesn't inspire or encourage consumer trust. 

If you have a Facebook page, an Instagram profile, or a strong presence on LinkedIn, you're already on your way toward creating your personal brand. And if you have a blog, even better. Defining your brand gives you a significant competitive advantage over those who don't have a presence online or on social media. Plus, it helps you to stand out among your competitors and attract the attention of prospective clients and employers. 

The more unique and eye-catching your brand is, the stronger your advantage when securing clients, projects, and a sustainable source of income from your creative work. 

The Importance of Personal Branding

Consider some of the world's most iconic media personalities: Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and Madonna. Bill Gates is world-renowned as a tech icon. Oprah is a kind, concerned, and fair commentator. Madonna is the epitome of the contemporary pop music movement. 

Each person has a clearly defined personal brand that is globally recognised and celebrated. 

Likewise, personal branding is a powerful tool for establishing trust, authority, and credibility in your creative work. The demand for creative entrepreneurs and digital artists has burgeoned over the past decade. The more you can differentiate yourself within your industry, the better equipped you'll be to attract valuable opportunities and gain widespread recognition. 

Creating a brand identity allows you to showcase your unique talents and skills. It will enable you to communicate your values and mission and connect with prospective clients and your wider audience on a deep, personal level. When you achieve this, you're elevating your work above the status of a mere product or service. You will effectively sell it as an experience and a meaningful connection, setting you apart from your rivals.

A robust personal brand can build the foundations for your success by attracting business and bringing new opportunities. It also helps to enhance recognition and awareness around your business and work. Building a strong personal brand will require continuous effort, meticulous planning, and smart public relations. But when done right, it will benefit you in myriad ways for many years to come.

Public Relations in Personal Branding Strategies

Public relations (PR) is a critical part of any personal branding strategy today. Using PR in strategic ways helps to shape public perception of your brand and manage your image to ensure that you attract the clients and employers you are looking for. Additionally, PR can assist you in establishing authority and building your reputation within your specific industry or niche.

Social media platforms have become must-have tools for PR and personal branding. Social channels enable you to reach an international audience and directly engage with your audience. It allows you to create and shape a narrative that aligns with your mission and values. Ultimately, your brand is a story about what you offer and who you are. Social media helps you to share that story with the audience most likely to have an interest in what you offer.

Blogging for Your Personal Brand

Creating a personal website or blog is an effective way to showcase your achievements, work, talents, and skills online. Your blog is a space that you have complete control over, which enables you to design it around your skills, style, and individual personality.

When you manage your blog, you can maintain complete control over its functionality, design, content, and appearance. With the right approaches, you can tailor your blog to reflect your personal brand and show off your strengths and abilities to your audience. Moreover, when you own your website, you own your content and domain name. This ensures that your online presence cannot get hijacked, suspended, or shut down by third parties.

Creating a personal blog helps to create a professional self-image. Mainly, if you use your blog to showcase your expertise, authority, and work within your niche, it may help set you apart from your competitors and add value for your readers. Blogs also allow you to use search engine optimisation to expand your reach and visibility online. When you use SEO tactics as part of your blogging strategy, you can make it easier for people looking for your specific skills to find you online.

Additionally, blogs are also highly flexible platforms, particularly when compared to social media channels. 

Blogs enable you to post and share various content types, from portfolios and videos to written text, graphics, downloadable files, and more. You can also use data to identify the best topics to write about according to which issues are most searched at any given time and how much competition is ranking for the problems in question. This allows you to identify precisely what to write about, ensuring that your content has a strong chance of ranking high on search engine results pages.

Potential Disadvantages of Blogging

There are many potential benefits of blogging for your brand. However, there are some prospective cons to take into consideration, too. 

Firstly, if you don't enjoy writing, this may not be the best platform to build your brand. However, you can always outsource writing to freelancers who can create content you can use. 

Secondly, creating engaging blogs takes time—more time than it would to start engaging social media posts in most cases. Blogs and personal websites also have establishment costs, especially if they're self-hosted. So, you'll need to pay to establish your site and blog and keep it running. If you need to have your website designed for you, this can push your costs up, too. And there are updates to consider, too.

Your blog will be subject to the ranking algorithms of top search engines like Google. Search engines can change their ranking algorithms at short notice (and do so frequently). This means you'll need to spend time and effort remaining up to date with the latest updates to ensure that your blogs achieve their full potential in terms of reach and engagement.

Blogging also takes more time to achieve a steady reach than social media posts. It takes time for search engines to identify and rank your blog posts after you publish them. It can take days, weeks, or even months for new blogs to work their way up the rankings and attract more traffic to your site. As the biggest search engine in the world, Google's crawler has to update over 100 trillion pages in its index regularly, and there's no hard and fast rule as to how long this can take. Other search engines may move faster as they have fewer pages, but page one on Google is where you need to be to gain traction. 

 Additionally, blogging can be tricky to outsource, especially when compared to outsourcing social media post creation. You'll need to hire a skilled writer and a specialist in your niche to ensure your articles are factual and accurate.

Social Media for Your Personal Brand

Social media is an invaluable tool for creating and enforcing your brand. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and now even TikTok, which hit 1.7 billion users in 2023, are widely used for building personal brands for several vital reasons. The first of which is their reach. Social channels have millions, if not billions, of active users. When you post to them, you can reach a far wider audience than you would with a personal website and blog alone.

Social channels are designed and optimised to help you engage with your audience. They allow you to interact with your followers directly, build relationships, and create an active and engaged community around your brand. Social media is free, enabling you to create a profile or page in minutes and start building your brand as soon as your profile is up and running. 

Plus, social pages have built-in analytics that assist you in understanding your audience and the reach and impact of your content. They also allow your content to go viral, reaching an audience of thousands or even millions of prospective clients and employers. Additionally, these platforms are great for networking, giving you a space to highlight your brand personality and connect with other professionals and businesses in your niche.

Last but not least, if you're interested in automating your brand strategy, then social media provides ample opportunities. Social media is more straightforward to automate, and you can use AI-based tools to create batches of targeted content. You can schedule this content for posting in advance and ensure it auto-posts optimally to maximise your brand's visibility and engagement.

Potential Disadvantages of Social Media

Of course, everything has a downside, and social media has a few you need to know about when building your brand.

Firstly, social media is not ‘evergreen' in the same sense as blogging, and it's much more sensitive to time and trends. Old social media posts won't drive traffic in the same way as older blog posts, and social posts tend to age far more quickly than value-added written content.

Secondly, social content typically focuses more on videos, pictures, and visual elements. This leaves little room for informative data and long-form text. Ultimately, whether or not this is a disadvantage depends on your niche, work, and your goals for your brand.

Social media content is more challenging to search for online than blog posts. Blogs get indexed by search engines, but social content is only searchable on specific social channels using more basic search capabilities. While hashtags can make specific posts easier to find, and you can still use keywords on social media, it has a different impact. 

Important tip: Social media algorithms are more prone to rapid and significant changes than search engine algorithms. Instagram is starting to favour videos over images, which could impact certain brands depending on their preferred content strategies. These significant changes can require substantial and quick alterations to your content strategy. In turn, this can negatively affect your engagement and reach at short notice.

Social media drives a different level of website traffic. While it does provide avenues for building and connecting with audiences, it doesn't drive vast sums of traffic to your website. Even if you're effectively engaging your followers with your content and funnelling them to your site from your social accounts, this means that if one of your objectives is to get as many followers to your website as possible to earn revenue from ads, focusing on social media may not provide optimal results. Especially not when compared to possible ones with Google or other major search engines.

Moreover, your social media strategy may take more time and effort than blogging, particularly when responding to followers' messages and comments, interacting with other accounts, and creating content for your social profiles. You will also need to post regularly and consistently to maintain engagement. Plus, there's also the risk that a social platform may not be around forever—at least not in its current forms.

Where Does Influencer Marketing Fit In?

Building your brand online and on social media should play a vital role in any future marketing plans that include partnerships with influencers. It's become common to see influencers promoting products and services online, and the influence these personalities have on the public is essentially thanks to intelligent personal branding strategies.

Statistically, influencers do have the power to influence engagement and sales positively. Studies reveal that not only do influencers influence buying power but that the influencer marketing industry is on the rise, too. 17% of people have purchased from a brand after seeing someone endorse the brand's products on social media channels, and almost a third of people between the ages of 16 and 34 have purchased a product after seeing a shared product endorsement. In 2022, the influencer marketing industry was worth at least $16.4 billion, and it's expected to grow to $143 billion by 2030.

Blog vs Social Media: Which is Best?

Personal blogs and social media pages both offer advantages when it comes to building your brand. 

But which is the superior choice? 

Ultimately, the best choice for you will depend on your specific goals, content, and audience. 

The first factor to consider when making this choice is the level of control you want. If you're aiming for complete control over your digital presence and personal brand, then a blog will provide you with a greater degree of control over how you'll be perceived online. If you aim to expand your reach and connect with as many people as possible personally, then social media may be a more suitable choice.

If you're looking for a way to showcase many different types of content, including videos, text blogs, and portfolios, then a personal website and blog may be the right way. Conversely, if you're seeking ways to share short-form content and real-time updates, then social media may be the ideal fit for your needs.

While blogs and websites are mainly well known for their benefits in showcasing professional skills and achievements, social media channels can also suit these purposes. You may use either of these platforms – or both – to create a highly professional and engaging personal brand that gets you noticed by high-ticket clients.

When analysing the efficacy and reach of your content, social media provides accurate and detailed analytics to help you understand your audience and create engaging and captivating content. That said, you can achieve similar results using analytical tools like Google Analytics to gauge your audience's engagement.

Additional Methods of Building Your Brand

Aside from posting content on social media and creating valuable blogs for your website audience, there are a few other methods you can use to build a solid and enduring personal brand for your creative business. 

These methods include:

• Keeping your social media profiles up to date. Use professional, up-to-date images for your social media profiles, and use the same photos across platforms. This ensures you create a feeling of brand continuity that your audience recognises and trusts. You can remove outdated content if it no longer serves your purpose or reflects your brand, but never remove negative reviews. Respond to them and resolve them as people notice when they vanish!
• Staying true to yourself. Letting your authentic personality shine through your online presence is the key to building a passionate and engaged audience. This applies to both your social media channels and your website.
• Share interesting niche content. Sharing relevant and exciting news stories and how-to guides through your online channels helps you to remain knowledgeable in your niche and adds value for your followers and fans. 
• Keep in touch with industry publications and groups. Engage with their posts, answer questions, share their content, and offer meaningful comments within these groups to establish yourself as an expert. The more brand recognition you can garner, the better. Not just from potential customers but other business leaders too. 
• Share your knowledge generously. When you use your expertise to assist other people with solving their challenges, you can keep them engaged and reciprocate the energy and time they have used to reach out to you. This ensures that you and your brand are memorable.
• Use your channels for networking. Reaching out to new contacts on LinkedIn and other social media platforms can expand your network in record time. This can be as simple as identifying the people you wish to connect with and sending out invitations with short, personalised messages attached.
• Fuel engagement with questions and polls. These simple tactics are a great way to engage your audience and get them thinking about relevant topics within your niche. The results are also invaluable as they can help you to make data-driven decisions about your offerings. Keep things varied with a mix of general and professional-related topics and questions.
• Share your personal life. Most followers love visual content with a human touch. Share snippets of your personal life with them online, including short clips of work conferences and industry events, trips to clients, and work-in-progress shots of your current projects and experiments. Remember to keep it professional. But feel free to add a casual element now and then. Even a photo of your morning coffee will give your content a personal look and feel!
• Consider sharing your blog articles on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is currently considered one of the best social and networking channels for professionals, combining aspects of both social media and long-form content. Sharing your blogs on LinkedIn can effectively grow your brand while attracting the attention of potential clients and followers in your industry. It's a great way to network and connect with other professionals who will remember your brand. 
• Share your content across multiple platforms with cross-platform tools. Specialised tools like Hootsuite and Socialpilot allow you to schedule and share posts across multiple platforms from a single dashboard. This lets you gain as much value as possible from each piece of content you create without spending time posting them across platforms individually or optimising them for separate websites.

The Takeaway – The Best Of Both For Branding

When deciding which medium – a blog vs social media posts – is the best for building your brand, there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

The best medium will depend on the nature of your creative work, the preferences of your target audience, and the type of personal brand image you want to create. 

Depending on your needs, blogging and social media posting may be an ideal pairing for strengthening your brand. Blogs can establish you as an expert in your field and share valuable information with your audience. Social posts can reach a far wider audience and help you to foster renewed levels of engagement. 

Furthermore, blogs can be promoted via social media posts, and you can use your social media profiles to promote your website and blog, making these two mediums complementary to one another. If your resources allow for it, consider using both blogs and social posts to fuel your creative business and earn the recognition you deserve.