As social media become more pervasive, forming an ever larger part of our everyday lives, it is only natural that they should begin to impact our careers. In the first study of its kind, HKUST’s Yanzhen Chen and colleagues set out to discover whether creating a personal “brand” on social media can improve executives’ performance in the job market.

“We started the research back in 2014,” explain the researchers, “when Obama resorted to Twitter as one of his major campaign promotion vehicles.” They wondered whether the same strategy would work for business professionals. With the rise of social media platforms, job-seekers now have a powerful tool for advancing their careers through “personal branding” (PB), defined as the conscious and ongoing process of shaping one’s image in the eyes of others (such as employers).

However, this approach may have drawbacks. “Even though the benefits of PB have been touted by practitioners,” say the researchers, “it can also hurt one’s job market performance if it is poorly implemented and causes dislike from potential employers.” Filling a gap in the literature, the team aimed to explore how executives’ PB activities on social media affect their career outcomes.

To do this, the researchers first selected executives with verified Twitter accounts and crawled their posts for information on their PB activities. They combined this information with data on executive employment and compensation from 2010 to 2013. “Using natural language processing techniques, we were able to measure the self-promotion related content and quantify its impact using the number of followers of the accounts,” explain the authors. Technical upgrades to the Twitter app enabled them to “tease out the impact of self-promotion on labour market outcomes from other characteristics of candidates, such as their personalities.”

The results were striking. “A more PB-active candidate is more likely to be hired than a less active one,” say Chen and the team. “We found that personal branding may help with the chance of getting a dream offer by more than 30 percent.” Indeed, effective self-promotion on social media was more attractive to employers than other characteristics of the executives, including their compromise in compensation and experience.

The researchers point out that Twitter essentially provides a free PB platform  for job-seekers. Users who create high-quality content for free are likely to benefit the most from this functionality. According to the authors, this “free–free equilibrium” reflects a win–win situation for Twitter and PB-active users. Other social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, could benefit from adopting Twitter’s business model to unleash the power of PB.

This is the first study to examine the influence of PB on job market performance, offering timely insights for professionals seeking to boost their career prospects in today’s social media era. The paper could also open up a new stream of exciting, high-impact research. “Research on how the personal branding effect differs for different types of candidates would be both theoretically interesting and practically relevant,” the authors tell us. This would also benefit other players in the job market. “A natural question after that,” the researchers conclude, “concerns the performance of companies after hiring executives with different personal branding efforts.”