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Building a Personal Brand as a College Student

Having a personal brand sets you apart from the rest of your peers and gives you an advantage when it comes to looking for opportunities. Your name is a brand itself!


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Tanya Bahl

3 years ago | 3 min read

It’s never too late or too early to do what you wish to, but when it comes to personal branding, the earlier, the better. And what could be better than to start working on your brand in college itself!Your name is a brand itself!

Now you may ask that why should I even think about building my own brand.

Well, the answer is simple and it’s that investing time in creating a personal brand is one of the best investments you can make.

Having a personal brand sets you apart from the rest of your peers and gives you an advantage when it comes to looking for opportunities. It builds what you call credibility. Your brand is what expresses your personality, communication skills and confidence. Once you start building your own brand, you are able to make your voice reach out to so many people worldwide and that is what helps you stand out.

Think of it as your brand being your story and you would want to write a good one, isn’t it?

Now that you are familiar with why personal branding, let’s move on to the how.

While there are many platforms via which you can start your branding journey, LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for this. To say it better, social media is a vast ocean and LinkedIn is a treasure. It has so much untapped potential and that should be reason enough to carve an identity for yourself on the platform.

The organic reach on LinkedIn is really good and if you create quality content regularly, then you can build a great audience for your content along with your personal brand. I always say that people value your content and not your age!

But before you start with your journey on LinkedIn, there are some things you should take care of.

Firstly, ensure that your entire profile is complete since your profile is the first thing that people would see and how well you curate it decides whether people wish to connect with you or not. Simultaneously start building a good network by connecting with relevant people. Making connections is an ongoing process and it would never come to an end. After that start creating content on topics of your interest and slowly your network would start increasing along with your brand value.

It’s also advised to engage with other people’s content by adding meaningful comments. This gives a boost to your profile and makes your thoughts reach a wider audience.

I emphasized building a good network, so naturally, your next point of concern would be how to make meaningful connections. A good way is to start by connecting with batch mates and alumni of your college. That would give you an initial head start.

One more way to build a strong network is by observing the content being put out by different creators. If you are scrolling through LinkedIn and you come across a piece of content that catches your eye, then connect with the person who has written it. This way you build a quality network of like-minded people.

To top it all, an amazing advantage of LinkedIn is that the entire corporate world is present here, meaning you can connect with CEO’s of companies, hiring managers and many other influential people. Why not connect with them and have meaningful conversations!

My last piece of advice would be on what not to do on LinkedIn or rather the mistakes to avoid.

First and foremost, don’t shy away from creating content just because you feel that no one would read your content or that you don’t have enough experience to talk about something. There would always be some skills or experiences unique to you and you can create content revolving around the same.

In the process of creating content, initially, you may not get a high engagement on your posts and that is completely alright.

Don’t let this stop you from creating because you must remember that building a brand is not a one-day process, but a gradual one.

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Tanya Bahl

A final year student at Shri Ram College of Commerce who loves creating content.


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