BSSA #68 - Build your personal brand 🚀

🚨 Don’t forget your tickets for The Wide Event in September! Click here to see the event page

Heey everyone! 😁

I now have 20,000 followers on the platform X. I started posting on Twitter in December 2021.

Because I knew I had to improve my personal brand. I started doing this a few months back at a different level.

But I had to do it more publicly. I first tried LinkedIn but didn’t really like it. So I tried Twitter.

Building a personal brand is essential in today’s world. After a few years we started to see a different marketing emerging.

Companies started to work with influencers or to give a face to their brands.

This is mainly because customers are more fearful and want to feel reassured.

One quick sentence you probably heard is: People buy from people.

And companies understood that. But it can be hard to find the face of your company. It can cost a lot.

But everyone has someone he can use to be the face of the company, and this person is yourself!

This personal brand helped me as a person but also helped my company grow. Some people don’t even say they installed “WideBundle” but they installed “Mat’s app”

And some users even told us they didn’t know why they installed our app and not another one. They just “trusted” us.

To increase the effect, you can ensure all your employees become part of the company at a different level. This is something Lemlist has done correctly. If you don’t know Lemlist, it’s a cold email automation tool. His founder, Guillaume Moubeche, is the face of the company and slowly pushed his employees to share online to increase that effect.

But don’t worry about your employees yet. Focus on yourself.

In this email I will share with you how I did it. What worked for me and how you can start to do the same!

Before starting, let me share with you the benefits of building a solid personal brand:

• It’s easier to get partnerships (people already know you)

• You attract customers (it’s like an acquisition channel)

• If you sell or kill your product you can always build another one (this is an asset)

• Nobody will ever be able to copy this (it’s an unfair advantage)

• You’ll attract talent if you want to hire

• You can always find a specific expert in your audience when you have a problem

Now here is the process I followed:

1) What do you want to talk about?

You don’t need to have topics that go together. What’s great about personal branding is that people will follow you for who you are, not only the topics you’ll talk about.

If you like sport and business, you can talk about both!

To begin, pick 3 topics you want to discuss and ensure they’re specific enough.

Attracting people in that niche becomes easier when you talk about a specific topic. Because they won’t have many other people to follow.

When you are big enough you can start to talk about a bigger topic since you already have some social proof.

For example, I could’ve started talking about SaaS. But instead I spoke about Shopify Apps.

So everyone looking to learn more about Shopify Apps would follow me (they didn’t have many choices). But if I had started with SaaS, I wouldn’t be the first choice when you want to follow someone in that space!

But now that I have 20,000 followers, talking about SaaS in general becomes easier. I have social proof, I know what to share, etc.

2) Pick your social platform

Many mistakes in the beginning are doing all social media simultaneously. But it:

• Gives you too much work (when you don’t have enough results yet)

• You can’t be 100% on a platform

• You’ll split your results

So pick one and go all in. You have plenty of platforms to try! But choose one that grows organically.

→ Twitter account

→ Youtube channel

→ Linkedin

Look at what you like to do: writing, talking, filming, etc… But most importantly, look at what people in your niche are using.

Targeting Shopify Apps Devs, Twitter is an obvious choice!

3) Share daily

This is where most people will stop. Don’t be a passive user of these platforms. Be active!

Talk about your topics, it could be anything! But just start sharing.

The more ideas you share, the more ideas you’ll get. That’s like a muscle. So you don’t need to know what you’ll share for a year.

Just be consistent.

I started on Twitter posting 3 times a day. You can also repeat the same things but say them in another way.

I talked about tracking data with Mixpanel many times! But you’ll get new followers, people who won’t see your posts, or people who will understand a concept only if you say it differently.

Sharing daily is really the most important task. Even if you don’t know what platform you should use or what topic you want to discuss, you'll get something as soon as you share daily!

I started talking about e-commerce on Linkedin and in French, then stopped. I began talking about Shopify Apps in French on Twitter, then stopped. Finally I tried English and I liked it.

It’s all about trying and sharing consistently.

Feedback about the new channel

On July 1 we started video content (TikTok, Reels and Shorts) and here is after 2 months where we are:

It didn’t work!

So, no results or videos worked (we posted 1 video a day).

So this isn’t something I knew. I had never recorded videos. So I’m learning.

What we were doing for 2 months didn’t really work so we’ll give it a try again by updating the strategy:

• Look at the videos that worked better to replicate them

• Change our system

And again it’s an iteration process. What’s complicated here is that we don’t have that much data so it’s hard to know exactly what didn’t work, we can’t ask people, etc.

I will keep you in touch so you can reuse the strategy too.

Don’t forget The Wide Event!

On Saturday 16th of September, we have The Wide Event, it’s a Shopify partners event for both partners and merchants.

And we prepared some great talks for you!

I’ll be there to answer all your questions and share some incredible tips 🔥

It’s also the best way to find new sponsors and network!

(I actually started Shopify Apps in 2017 after meeting my 2 previous co-founders in Paris)

You can get your tickets by clicking on the button below 👇

That’s it for today’s email!

I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to share my newsletter with someone else: https://news.matdesousa.com/

And let me know what you want me to discuss in the next email!

See you next week,

Mat 😁