Personal Branding in the Digital Era: How Individuals Build and Manage Their Personal Brand on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok

Abstract

The management of personal brands on social media platforms has become an increasingly relevant professional competency in the contemporary digital context. This article examines how individuals build, manage, and sustain their personal brand on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. The study adopts a mixed methodological approach, combining a systematic literature review with qualitative evidence obtained through semi-structured interviews. The systematic review focused on open-access articles indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science, published between 2020 and 2025, and integrated studies addressing topics such as personal branding, self-branding, human branding, engagement on digital platforms, and identity management on social media. Additionally, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with professionals from marketing, design, financial markets, and related fields, following a common interview guide covering professional identity, platform-specific strategy, management tools, evaluation metrics, perceived risks, and practical recommendations. The findings show that an effective personal brand rests on the alignment between a stable core identity and forms of expression adapted to the specificities of each platform. LinkedIn is used primarily to signal authority, competency, and employability; Instagram supports visual credibility, lifestyle expression, and the humanization of the professional profile; and TikTok offers organic reach and spontaneity, though it raises credibility and reputational risk concerns in certain professional contexts. Participants valued tangible outcomes such as job opportunities, partnerships, and qualified interactions over so-called vanity metrics, although follower growth remains relevant for profiles oriented towards public visibility. The article concludes that the digital personal brand should be understood as a strategic, continuous, and ethically responsible process that requires consistency, self-knowledge, adaptive communication, and thoughtful management of exposure across different platforms.