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We’ve all heard the horror stories of what an ill-conceived social media post can do to one’s professional image, but while they don’t make headlines as often, there are some incredible stories of people who have created powerhouse personal brands using the same outlets. Amber Mac at Fast Company points out the example of Winston Sih, who hasn’t even graduated from high school, but has already started a strong career as a TV tech expert and blogger through wise use of social media.

If building a stronger personal brand is one of your resolutions this year, Mac offers five tips for where to start, and who knows where you’ll be starting off 2013?

1. Have a home base online.

While Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are excellent destinations to promote what you do, make sure that you also invest time and energy into your own personal website. Whether you take advantage of easy-to-use tools such as Squarespace or WordPress, a simple and clean online home for all your professional information and social streams is a necessity…

2. Be a better blogger.

Although online pundits regularly declare that blogging is dead, such as Jason Calacanis did at a tech conference toward the end of December, blogging has simply become much more diverse. It’s no longer necessary to write multi-paragraph posts, but instead services such as Tumblr make it easy for individuals to share shorter entries or snippets of text that often include photos and other multimedia. A weekly blog update (or more frequent if you can afford the time) that includes some shareable content is a useful way to drive traffic back from social channels to your website (and to establish yourself as an expert on a topic).

Full story at Fast Company.

Making social media work for you.

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