During this semester I was only able to raise my Brand Yourself score by 1. I feel this does not accurately show the amount of work I put into trying to raise my score. I added more accounts, posted more, and linked up more accounts to Brand Yourself and all of these had little impact to my score. Infect more of them did a whole lot of nothing.
The thing I did that had no effect that annoyed me the most was taking down marked posts. I do down close to 50 posts. However, even after many scans that Brand Yourself does weekly my score never changed. What annoyed me even more was that through out this semester Brand Yourself always told me that I had 52 red flag posts on my twitter, but even after deleting the tweets that number never went down. On top of that, the free version shows your one red flagged tweet that they found, so of cores I deleted that tweet. But, Brand Yourself never updated that I took that tweet down even after I know I did it still negatively effected my score.
Another thing Brand Yourself told me I should do it post more. I was forced to do this for class during a week where my class had to show we knew how to use Hootsuite. During this week I had to post many times where normally I only tweet every other month. Even during this week where I tweeted my times, my score still did not move at all. I know all these tweets were safe, clean, and would not bring down my score, but they did not help it either. I am confused as to why Brand Yourself would tell me do stuff like tweet/post more, but not show me that it is helping. After deleting tweets and posting more I began to believe that due to using the free version of Brand Yourself, it does not really check your Twitter after you put it in for the first time. Not once from this whole semester has it given me a reason to think that it does. It could be due to how little posts I post, but it should have at least updated that I had less red flag posts.
The only thing that did change my score was adding more accounts to my Brand Yourself account. Once I added my LinkedIn and Word Press it finally changed my Brand Yourself score. By a whole point! This finally showed me that it was possible to change, and it was not just a number they gave you to try and get you to pay for the full version. However, I feel it should have changed it more. Brand Yourself makes it feel like these other social media profiles are not important and that the only thing you need to worry about is your twitter. Even through out the semester of posting on Word Press that would also not change my score on Brand Yourself.
Throughout the semester I felt like Brand Yourself was just trying to get me to buy the full version. I view the free version as pretty much useless as it does not update any active thing you are doing on any of the social medias you have linked into your account. After writing this blog I will probably never use Brand Yourself again unless I plan to buy the full version.
Ryan Baldwin 