Consistency

Be consistent

Humans love consistency. Developers REALLLY love consistency.

Here’s an idea of how much humans love consistency. We often want people who are famous for doing a thing to come on to OUR stage and do the thing. Then they do the thing, and we cheer! Simple as that. There’s so much chaos in the world and having some cultural touchstones that never change is comfort, nostalgia, and joy bundled up into one.

Here’s Seth McFarlane being prodded to do the voice of Kermit the Frog and Stewie from Family Guy - something he’s done a billion times on a billion talk shows - but he does it anyway, and we love it anyway. We LOVE when people “do the thing!”

Similarly, when we market ourselves, we should be consistent. People love seeing the same names and faces pop up again (caveat: you should mainly be associated with positive vibes when you do this).

I recommend taking consistency to an extreme level. We used to do this offline with business cards. Online, our profiles have become not only our business cards but also our faces. The majority of people who see you online will never see you in person. On most platforms, your profile photo is “read” before your username. Your username is, in turn, read before your message. Your message is read more than any link you drop. And so on. Therefore, I strongly recommend the following things.

Photo

Take a good photo and use the same photo everywhere. A professional photographer is worth it, but even better can be something with a good story or an impressive venue. If possible, try to show your real face and try to smile. This already puts you ahead of ~50% of users who don’t understand the value of this.

Photos are seen before usernames. See examples here and here.

Companies spend millions on their logos. So, why shouldn’t you spend some time on yours? We are irrationally focused on faces, and we really like it when people smile at us. Thankfully, because it’s just a photo, it costs us nothing to smile at everybody all the time. It’s a really easy way to associate your face with positive emotions, and when we see you pop up on multiple different platforms with the same smiling face, we light up! The emotion completely transfers, and the branding is nonverbal but immediate.

Real name

Show your real, professional name if possible, unless your username is your working name. This works especially well in anonymous platforms like Reddit and Hacker News because you are taking an additional step of de-anonymizing yourself. People respect this.

Username

If possible, your username should be your name (so people can guess it). Otherwise, choose something you intimately identify with. You should probably have the same usernames on most platforms so that people can find you/tag you easily. Some, like myself, will simply use their usernames as their working names forever. This can be a branding opportunity as well, similar to the way musicians adopt mononyms and fighter pilots adopt callsigns.

Words

You should consistently associate yourself with a small set of words. Where a bio is allowed, you should have those words prominently displayed. For example, it doesn’t take a lot to show up whenever SVG Animation or React and TypeScript are mentioned. You can set Google Alerts or Tweetdeck filters for this, and before long, you’ll just get associated with those terms. When you have your own words, like a catchphrase or motto, and it catches on, that is yet another level of personal branding.

People make fun of you

You will have made it when people start making fun of you. I’m not 100% serious, but I’m at least a little bit serious: Can people make memes of you, and others instantly get it? If so, you’ve got a personal brand.

All this personal branding will be ten times more effective when you have a domain.