Personal branding is all the rage these days, and specifically in B2B people are generally talking about LinkedIn as the personal branding platform of choice.

In this episode, we talk with Steve Lamar, the CEO of PromoPrep, about how he has built a personal brand on Twitter - not LinkedIn - to more than double traffic to the site and increased product signups by 25%.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why/how to build in public
• How to put out content that creates awareness but doesn’t directly sell the product
• How to connect the personal brand to the company brand
• How to measure the impact of your personal brand on your business

Steve’s recommendations:

1. Use the 80/20 rule for your content (80% who you are / 20% more promotional or product focus)
2. Choose your channel carefully and don’t spread yourself too thin.
3.  Establish relationships with people by publicly engaging with people’s tweets and via DMs.
4. Keep an idea repository spreadsheet for tweets that has a character count
5. Twitter needs to be snappier, compared to LinkedIn posts - they have a much shorter shelf life

You’ll need to listen to the full episode if you want to hear the Lightning Round, but here are a few highlights:

• Steve is looking forward to expanding content marketing - having an SEO background he has admittedly not done enough for his own site.
• Steve loves Snagit, and we are big proponents of this screenshot tool as well.

Proofpoint’s POV:

We are big proponents of personal branding at Proofpoint and encourage everyone who works here to build their personal brand. Not strictly because it will help Proofpoint - it will - but because it is invaluable for them as professionals. 

Personal brands have become my go-to way to find people to recruit and to evaluate inbound candidates. I don’t as much care about their resume, but I definitely pay attention to the content they have put out. And if I have two candidates with seemingly the same skillset, but one with a much stronger personal brand, I’ll often choose the latter.

It’s interesting that personal brands have become all the rage because in the DTC space, influencers and content creators have been building personal brands for over a decade. Pretty much ever since social media became a thing, people have been building brands and leveraging those brands to make money, land deals, land jobs, etc.

The big problem that I see with personal brands is that the term has become too nebulous. For the average professional, a personal brand is really your reputation management. If you think about it that way, it makes content creation much easier, because it gives your personal brand a purpose.

A bit more about Steve:

Steve is a former agency guy, with over a decade of SEO and PPC experience. From that experience he saw a problem - how marketing agencies managed marketing and content calendars - and decided to solve it by building PromoPrep. He has chosen to build in public and now has over 15K followers on Twitter.

Helpful Links & Resources:

• Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevelamar/
• Follow Steve on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevejlamar/
• Follow PromoPrep to see what they are up to next: https://twitter.com/promoprep 

Connect with Mike & Gaby at Proofpoint:

• Mike’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegrinberg/
• Gaby’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellaisrael/
• LinkedIn Company Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proofpoint-marketing-llc
• Proofpoint YouTube Channel: http://bit.ly/ProofpointonYouTube
• Proofpoint Website: www.proofpoint.marketing