[VIDEO] Models Know Social Media (Marketing): A-List Model Gigi Hadid Dishes On Building Her Personal Brand

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This writer stopped keeping track of supermodels during the Age of Cindy Crawford. Today, I realize I can start keeping track again, as today’s millennial models, have a thing or two to teach us. Meet Gigi Hadid, a 19 year-old California native and A-List model who is wielding her 2.8 million followers on social media to build a personal brand and land big advertising contracts.

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Recently, Hadid was interviewed during her Adweek cover shoot in New York City.

Building a brand through social media is trickier than opening an Instagram account, creating content and adding people. After all, social media is, first and foremost, a medium for dialogue. If you are promoting yourself or a product, your network may not always be saying things you want said on your channel. In other words, it isn’t always pretty. Quoted in Adweek, Hadid explains, “My friends are teaching me that you can’t always fight back because that will just fuel the fire. I’m trying to find the balance of staying true to myself and learning to be a public figure.”

Related Story: Think Before You Post: Five Social Media Virtues

These are some of the ideas that Hadid suggested about social media marketing that any business person can think about and put to practice:

1. Your clients may bring up what you are posting: evidence that people are paying attention and you should become more self-aware about your content.
2. She learns from others: In the forest of social media, you are not alone.
3. A social media page must have a specific tone, or in her words, a “feeling” to it: be it a color scheme, a type of post or simply very well-made pictures.

Click here to see the video.