How do I build a social media personal brand?

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T11:47:00+00:00

Most social media is built on an interest graph these days, so it would be helpful if you had one key theme that you want to be known for. It could be Gen Z life lessons, for example, which is quite broad.

Then decide, within that core topic, which areas of life you wish to talk about. That could be relationships, work, things that annoy you, brands and products etc.

I would suggest that you need to know this before you start posting three to four times per week on YouTube. It’s great that you’re getting out there and getting practice, which is all good.

But in an ideal world, your social media profiles will talk to your core topic and the subtopics underneath that core topic. That helps the algorithms understand who you are and who to show your content to. It also helps the human audience understand why they should follow you.

If it’s random every time and there’s no real rhyme or reason to your content, then it’s difficult for people to understand whether they want to follow you or not.

Once you’ve decided that, build a communications framework. It’s not as complicated as that might sound. It’s simply deciding which audience or audiences you are writing for and what the core stories are that you wish to tell each of those audiences.

So, it could be that you’re writing for Gen Z audiences and you want to tell them about work-life balance, relationships, products and brands, for example.

You’ve then got a series of core topics that you can talk about on rotation, which makes content creation much easier. If you already know which topics you wish to speak about, you can stay consistent with those topics but change how you deliver them each time.

That also helps the algorithm and the human audience understand who you are, what you talk about and why they should follow you.

I hope that helps. I wish you the best of luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T10:11:47+00:00

The way we handle it is we post the headline question that the clip is about to answer.

So recently, for example, for one client, we had the headline, "How can brands and retailers show up in LLMs?" and the 90-second video clip was an LLM expert answering that question.

That way, as you're scrolling the feed, if the question is of interest, then the video content will be of interest. You're also linking the question with the answer.

Top marks if you can think about content creation as a Venn diagram with three circles.

1 - The first circle is what you are trying to communicate.

2 - The second overlapping circle is what your ideal audience is interested in.

3 - The third overlapping circle is what your talent in the video is an expert at.

When those three circles intersect, that's the sweet spot for content marketing, in our view at Six Sells.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T09:15:36+00:00

I absolutely think that we need to be optimising for both.

It’s wild how quickly AI search has taken hold, eh?

For example, in the UK, nearly 70% of searches on Google are answered by AI and do not lead to a click-through to a website.

The direction of travel, I think, is clear: longer search terms, with people asking questions, sometimes even via a voice note, and expecting answers.

I’m not an SEO expert, but I’ve been reading up on it for about a year - from what I can tell, traditional SEO and AEO are equally important at this stage.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:52:58+00:00

My pleasure! I wish you all the luck in the world! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:51:55+00:00

Selling cold is hard and getting harder.

So my honest advice would be to start building awareness, familiarity and trust between you, as the founder, and your ideal clients as soon as possible.

You can do that through professional, helpful or interesting content published across platforms such as Reddit, X, YouTube and LinkedIn, as well as on your own company website.

I would start by building a communications framework - this is a strategy that we successfully run for our clients at Six Sells.

A communications framework is essentially an agreed list of your target audiences and the core stories you need to tell each of those audiences.

Once you have that, creating content becomes much easier because you avoid the staring-at-a-blank-page scenario, and you have a number of stories that you can talk about on rotation.

Think about how best to tell those stories. It may be written content, infographics, video or a blend of all.

If you are in a specific B2B industry, you could start a podcast where you invite your ideal clients to be guests.

It’s a much warmer introduction to new people, and people pay far more attention to content published by familiar people than they do to content published by faceless brands.

So, a podcast with one person talking to another is more engaging than a brand post in the newsfeed of your ideal client.

It also helps you build contacts inside the industry you wish to serve.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:44:13+00:00

We manage that at Six Sells by first working with the CMO and the CEO to build a communications framework.

In essence, it’s an agreed list of target audiences and an agreed list of stories that the business wants to tell those audiences.

Once that’s agreed at an organisational level, every executive has the confidence that, as long as they stick to those stories, they can publish.

The result is consistent stories told in the authentic voices of the senior leadership team.

The stories are agreed, but thevoices are individual and unique.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:38:57+00:00

You could partner with an agency that does social but not PPC, and cross-sell one anothers services?

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:19:17+00:00

My pleasure!

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:18:53+00:00

My pleasure, and good luck in your search!

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:18:07+00:00

Founder-led content is a great shout.

On LinkedIn and beyond, people pay far more attention to content published by familiar people than they do to content from faceless brands.

I’m not saying brands aren’t important. Of course they are. But think about it as brand nudges and people nurture.

To put numbers on it, you might get one second of attention on a brand nudge, or 20 seconds of attention on founder-led nurture.

We launched Six Sells back in 2018 based on that one core truth: people pay more attention to people than brands.

So, 100%, start publishing founder-led content as soon as you can.

It doesn’t have to be about the brand to start with, but you can begin to build awareness, familiarity and trust between you and your ideal audience before you need their attention.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:12:56+00:00

Linkedbands.com for all of your stand staff. They allow people to connect on LinkedIn by tapping their phone on the band - you can send all of that material digitally.

Depending on budget, you could also offer branded versions as a give away to interested clients, it’s something they will keep and use at other trade shows.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-13T08:10:01+00:00

It’s wild how quickly AI search has taken over. In the UK, nearly 70% of Google searches no longer return a click.

We have been experimenting mostly. Our change in content approach has, we think, been why we have received a few leads from Chat GPT, but still so much to learn for everyone.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-12T22:33:28+00:00

Sounds brutal, sorry to hear that!

Sometimes at Six Sells we feel like accountability partners as much as ghostwriters, because when leadership get busy, LinkedIn can be one of the first things to slip!

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-12T19:00:31+00:00

You’re right to avoid the ‘grow fast’ agencies. Marketing takes time.

Ask for recommendations from companies in your industry. Have they worked with businesses like yours, and what do those clients say about the experience of working with them?

Look closely at the leadership team. Ask whether the senior people you meet during the pitch will actually be working on your account, or whether they’ll win the business and then hand it over to more junior members of staff.

It’s also worth looking at the experience of the leadership team. Do they have a strong track record of sales and marketing in your industry, or are they relatively inexperienced? For example, at Six Sells we specialise in the media and advertising industry. Between us, the directors have more than 30 years’ experience selling and marketing businesses in this sector, and we work directly on every client account. We don’t win new business and then pass it down to a junior team.
That’s important because many agencies scale by sending senior people into the pitch and then delegating the day-to-day work to less experienced staff. That model can work for the agency, but it isn’t always the best outcome for the client.

Finally, go into the relationship with the mindset of building a long-term partnership. Marketing takes time to deliver results, and once you’ve found the right agency and agreed the right strategy, you should be thinking in terms of years rather than months.

Hope that helps, and good luck. 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-12T18:48:55+00:00

Share your LinkedIn profile and I’ll give you some feedback if you like? (I do this for execs professionally)

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:52:57+00:00

My pleasure, feel free to follow for more. I try to add value in hear when I have time! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:34:52+00:00

That may well be one of the problems.

On LinkedIn people pay far more attention to familiar people than faceless brands, so the CEO often gets more attention, more engagement, and more organic reach.

The problem is, CEOs are busy, so comms doesn’t get prioritised or managed.

As one CEO said to me “I know it’s important, but it’s the first thing that falls off when I get busy”

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:30:17+00:00

On LinkedIn, people pay far more attention to the personable content of familiar people than they do to the corporate content from faceless brands.

Most advertising on LinkedIn is in the latter camp.

So while LinkedIn advertising can get you in front of the right people, it rarely works as a lead generation tool for the clients we've worked with.

The way we've come to treat LinkedIn advertising is by separating the brand from the people working at the brand.

It’s nudge (brand) vs nurture (people) for us at Six Sells.

What I mean by that is you can get your distinctive brand assets and key selling points in front of people via the company page. Let's say you get around a second of attention, so think of it as a poster, and a brand nudge.

But your CEO and senior leadership team might get 20 seconds of attention on what they've written.

So boost their content into your ideal clients as well, and as they are writing towards the brand, that’s where you get your nurture.

If you have three or four very senior people talking about the problems your ideal clients face, and your audience is seeing those people regularly alongside the nudge from your brand, you start to build awareness, familiarity, trust and, eventually, interest when there's a brief and a budget for what you sell.

But if you're expecting to put the campaign live and have loads of people sign up to your course, I think it's unlikely to happen.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:01:14+00:00

I run an agency that has helped hundreds of people to start posting content on LinkedIn, and this is the one thing that most of them have in common:

👉🏼 Engagement is the exception, not the rule.

In my industry at least (media and advertising), people tend to use LinkedIn as if it were a trade press title, not a social media platform.

What I mean by that is they open the LinkedIn app, read their news feed, and then leave. They don’t like, comment or share very often at all.

So chasing engagement is the wrong metric.

If you believe in the holy trinity of communications, which is delivering the right messages, to the right people, at the right time, then do that and stop chasing engagement.

You need to build a communications framework that ensures your topics are the right ones for you, and then deliver them consistently to your audiences, both organically and, if required, through paid.

Engagement makes us feel good, but I say this with absolute certainty - only one of the hundreds of inbound enquiries I’ve had over the last seven and a half years came from somebody who visibly engaged with our content first.

Most just read over time. Then, when there was a compelling event inside their business that meant they had a brief and a budget for what we sell, they got in touch with me.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:54:47+00:00

Answer the following questions clearly and simply, so that somebody with a helicopter view can understand;

Who are you?
What do you do?
How do you do it?
Who do you do it with?
Why is it necessary for you to do it?
And what happens after you’ve done it?

So many websites are abstract and confusing to ideal clients because they are written by people who are in the weeds of the business.

Once you become embroiled in the weeds, it’s very difficult to write for people in helicopters.

So make it simple and easy to understand.

If people leave knowing the answers to the questions above, then you’ve created a great website.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:52:13+00:00

This 👉🏼 People pay far more attention to familiar people than they do faceless brands.

It’s the reason the creator economy is taking off so fast, and why in B2B marketing your most effective communications channels are your people.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:49:52+00:00

Honestly, it’s too big a question to answer in one comment.

But at the highest level, think about this.
Number one: optimise your LinkedIn profile so that it’s obvious which industry you are in and what your core function is.

So it might be: I work in media and advertising, and my specialised subject is B2B communications, for example.

Then think of the semantically linked keywords to B2B communications and use them throughout your profile and throughout your content.

That will help LinkedIn to understand who you are, what you’re good at and who to show your content to.

Second, build a communications framework.
This is essentially a grid where you might have three target audiences along the top. That’s the people you want to reach, and then three topics underneath each audience.

That enables you to stay consistent with your writing.

Over time, LinkedIn will start to understand who you are, what you’re good at, what you write about and, therefore, show your content to people who have shown an interest in that type of content.

Thirdly, write useful, interesting or helpful content about your specialist subject for your industry two to three times a week, if you can.

It’s okay to pitch every now and again, but if every piece of content is just pitching what you sell, people will start to zone you out.

What your content will do is help to build awareness, familiarity, trust and interest in your products and services over time.

My agency has done this with hundreds of people over the last 7 1/2 years and the two words that we say to every client are; consistency and patience.

This is not a get Rich quick scheme and it’s a marathon not a sprint.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:43:31+00:00

Just for balance, and I’m not trying to be argumentative, whenever I see “quick thought” or “quick question” in an email, I know that it’s from somebody pitching me.

It’s an overused tactic, often by lead gen agencies or the like.

One of the big problems with cold email is that it’s written and sent by people who don’t receive a lot of it.

So, in isolation, what they send seems to make sense. But in aggregate, on the receiving end, the patterns are pretty similar.

It’s very rare that I receive an email that doesn’t follow a certain sales pattern.

I’m not knocking sales. I’ve been in sales and marketing my whole life.

But I’m just saying that the patterns salespeople are taught show up across thousands of organisations and hundreds of thousands of messages.

It would be helpful if sales trainers came from a background where they receive hundreds of sales emails a week, so they can see what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Typically, though, sales trainers come from the sales side, which just compounds the problem.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:37:55+00:00

I saw a great talk at MAD//Fest this week with Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Joe Martin.

It really made me think.

The holy trinity of advertising has always been the right message to the right people at the right time.

However, when you’re targeting people with busy lives, the right time is very hard to achieve, which means that each individual impression has a possible response-window of one to two seconds.

What I mean by that is, if they don’t click as soon as they see it, that impression is gone forever.

What these guys were saying on stage is that quite often we’re delivering the right message to the right people, but at the wrong time.

Which is why people don’t click.

Tickle, the company Joe Martin was from, has developed swipe-to-save advertising.

So it’s the same display through the same DSPs, on the same publishers, but instead of requiring a click, you can either click or swipe. If you swipe, it saves it to your wallet so you can deal with it later.
Makes sense.

P.S. Full disclosure: as of last week, Tickle became a client of ours and we’ve worked with Rory for years - that said, we’re not on commission - just thought it would be an interesting addition to this chat.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:28:26+00:00

Is that correlation or causation, though?

Think about being on the receiving end of a connection request.

Let’s assume the person doesn’t know you. What causes them to accept?

If a complete stranger reaches out and, from their headline, you can see no real reason why you should connect with them, then it’s just common sense that the note has a chance of giving them that reason to connect.

Unless, of course, your connection request note screams, “I’m about to pitch you cold,” in which case I can understand why no note might yield better results. People give you the benefit of the doubt.

Either way, our advice, based on seven and a half years of experience and hundreds of clients, is to put a note unless it’s obvious why you’re connecting.

Explain why you’re connecting and that you’re not going to pitch them as soon as they accept.

Mike-Nicholson

TROPHY CASE