HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook

Dan Schawbel is the author of
Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 09), and owner of the award winning
Personal Branding Blog.

With over 200 million active users, Facebook has become a personal, product and corporate branding hub. Every brand that exists on
Facebook has the same core features and benefits, such as the ability to create a page, share resources, add multimedia and much more. You have a unique opportunity to leverage this platform for career success or as a playground for you and your closest friends.

The social graph is filled with CEOs, celebrities, entrepreneurs and people just like you who can be reached through Facebook?s messaging system without any boundaries or restrictions. Facebook is also a talent search engine and part of the college admission and corporate recruiting criteria. You will be searched on Facebook by potential dates, managers, and teachers, so use common sense in determining how you want to represent yourself. You are what you publish and first impressions are everything.

What follows is a guide to building your personal brand on Facebook. Continue the conversation by adding your own tips and stories below in the comments.

This post is part of Mashable?s
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1. Know your audience

Too many people are sharing information to the wrong audiences. Your manager doesn?t want to know if you just went to the bathroom and, although your parents would love to eavesdrop on your relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you might not want to share those details. Since our lives are starting to converge more and more every day, you need to decide what audiences you want to connect with on Facebook.

Do you want to use Facebook as a communication stream to your family and friends? Are you looking to network with professionals that could help you get a job? These are questions you need to start asking yourself before you add ?friends? to your Facebook profile. If you decide to open it up to the masses, then you need to be mindful of what you share and how that could impact people’s perception of you. Remember, you can limit what select users can see on your profile, just by changing your settings, which we’ll discuss more below.

2. Decide on your branding strategy

Everyone should have a Facebook branding strategy and it should be based not only on the audience you?re targeting, but your overall life goals. Depending on who you are, where you are in your career, what you?re passionate about and an expert in, you?ll want to brand yourself differently.

If you haven?t signed up for Facebook, then you have a great opportunity to start fresh and to build your Facebook profile to best represent you. If you?re a current Facebook user, then start analyzing how your brand is being portrayed and take steps to customize it to reflect your branding strategy.

If you don’t want to build a branding empire, a strategy should still be extremely important to you; you’re already branded and that brand can help shape perceptions online to portray you in a positive light and help you secure a good reputation.

HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook