Review: BrandYourself Helps You “Look Good” Online Financial Consultant

Review: BrandYourself Helps You “Look Good” Online

“Take control of your online reputation!” urges the new website BrandYourself.

Your name could be one of the 80 million names Googled every day, according to BrandYourself. Founded after CEO Pete Kistler realized his name was the same as that of a convicted felon, BrandYourself became a platform to improve and expand an individual’s online reputation.

BrandYourself has its roots at Syracuse Tech Garden’s student sandbox companies in the summer of 2009. Today, the company continues to receive accolades and honors for its innovation.

The purpose of BrandYourself is to help users improve their entire online reputation from one central online location. Much like MyWebCareer, BrandYourself helps you improve and maintain that reputation through statistics that monitor your brand—as in your Brand Strength, Google Grade, and web mentions. A big difference between BrandYourself and competitors is that it works for individuals as well as businesses, which might make help turn BrandYourself into a marketing powerhouse.

How does it work?

BrandYourself analyzes an individual or business’ Brand Strength, which is calculated as a percentage. When signing up as an individual, you can connect different social network accounts, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Your Brand Strength is then analyzed based on your social network accounts. The more accounts you connect, the higher your Brand Strength and the more you improve your online reputation. It’s an interesting tool for businesses to calculate the brand strength of their social media efforts.

Strengthening Your Online Brand

When I initially signed up for BrandYourself, my Brand Strength was 3%. BrandYourself immediately started me out at a “To Do List” page, which gave me steps to take to improve my online reputation, such as connecting my accounts and building a website in the BrandYourself directory.

After I added my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts, my Brand Strength jumped to 28%.

My Brand Strength jumped to 54% after I added my Google profile.

But BrandYourself isn’t just for individuals. Small businesses could also benefit from the analytics offered on the site. BrandYourself provides recommendations for small businesses who wish to extend their online reach. It helps fledgling companies become more engaged and effective in the realm of social media. This is perhaps the feature that sets BrandYourself apart the most.

Search Engine Optimization

One way BrandYourself sets itself apart from other online reputation analytics sites is through an emphasis on SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or online profile in search engine results. Basically, the more times your name or business is mentioned online through websites, profiles, blogs, and articles, the more searchable it will be in search engines such as Google.

BrandYourself gives members a “Google Grade,” which shows how well you are represented when searched in various search engines. BrandYourself will show your name’s first ten search results, and you determine whether the results are about you or not. BrandYourself then calculates your Google Grade. I received an A- because 7 out of 10 of my top search results were actually about me.

This is another interesting feature for businesses to use to test our how well their SEO efforts are working, according to BrandYourself metrics.

BrandYourself also functions as a social media platform that lets you update your Facebook and Twitter statuses simultaneously. In addition, its “Brand Dashboard” tab shows you your combined Twitter and Facebook feed.

What’s the catch?

BrandYourself is not free. There is a free trial period for 30 days, and after that you’ll have to pay $9.99/month as an individual or $49.99/month as a business to access all the features and analytical tools. While some users might want to opt for free alternatives for personal use, this could be a service worth the cost for a businesses to maintain its brand reputation.Also, the anaylsis engine of BrandYourself isn’t entirely comprehensive or intuitive yet. For example, some of my search engine results and online presence was lost because BrandYourself didn’t account for my current full name and my maiden name. We’ll see if BrandYourself can clue into this anomaly and make adjustments by allowing its users alias names.

Is it worth it?

Nowadays, your online reputation truly is important when networking and getting hired; with its unique website building capabilities and functionality for businesses, BrandYourself may be getting in on the ground floor of a new personal marketing tool that could soon become necessary when it comes to searching for a job or promoting a business.

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