Drawing Followers to Your Personal Brand

In the past two and a half years, I’ve learned a lot about advertising. Arguably one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is how essential it is to create a personal brand. It’s an excellent way to stand out and get noticed when trying to break into the industry. But how can you use social media to build your personal brand? Well, if your freelance artist, Greg Burney, you develop your own social media campaign.

Greg Burney is a British artist that was looking for a way to create a memorable connection with new customers. With a limited budget, he knew social media would be an effective way to reach them. To encourage them to connect with him on Twitter, Greg created the #drawmyfollowers campaign. Through his Twitter account, Greg announced that he would draw portraits of the first 3,000 new followers he received. He then encouraged them to retweet their drawings and share them with friends. After famous typographer, Erik Spiekermann retweeted his announcement, Greg’s followers instantly grew. Within two days, he went from 70 to 700 followers, and after a couple weeks, he had over 5,000 new followers. Not bad for someone starting out.

Some of the drawings Greg Burney made for his followers.

So what made this campaign work? Well, Greg knew he didn’t have a lot of money and certainly couldn’t afford to hire an ad agency, so he used what he had to engage his followers. By creating a personalized experience, he was able to connect with them, while also promoting and showing them the work he can do. He was able to attract new customers and increase his fan base, as many of them wanted to see more of his work. He also received attention from multiple blogs and websites that used his story as an example of a successful social media campaign.

While this is a unique way to create a personalized experience with consumers, I question the overall longevity of the campaign. Of course people respond well to incentive; however, once the 3,000 followers received their portraits, there was no guarantee that they would continue to seek more work from the artist. In fact, his followers have decreased, and as of today, Greg has a little over 3,700 followers on Twitter. Unfortunately, it appears that the novelty wore off, as some of his followers were no longer engaged or interested in what Greg had to offer. Although affordable, the campaign would also be time consuming and take Greg away from any immediate work that had to be done. 

Regardless of his future success, Greg Burney’s #drawmyfollowers campaign is an excellent example of how an individual person can use social media to gain attention and promote their personal brand. It demonstrates that people (or brands) don’t have to have a huge budget, or even need to hire an ad agency, to create a unique and effective social media campaign.

Source: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/artist-vows-draw-all-new-twitter-followers-136333