Takeaways:
Building a highly visible personal brand online means selecting for the content that a platform’s algorithm will promote - quick hooks on TikTok, bro-etry on LinkedIn.
Social media algorithms optimize for likes and engagement, and increasingly penalize ‘negative’ sentiment. This means that short, happy, shallow ideas predominate - hence Twitter’s 140 characters.
This has hollowed out discourse online, and it also flattens your identity. Unless you invest in a multi-year offline and online approach to building deeper relationships and community (which I would recommend), the only rational way to build followers as you become more well-known is to post more generic ‘fortune-cookie’ content.
Digital platforms like Facebook made building your personal brand an intensely conscious act; you had to type out ideas and cherry-pick photos to create the digital idea of ‘you’. But in reality all of us have been trained on ‘personal branding’ since we could buy our own clothes - for me this meant wearing DC shoes and Billabong hoodies in high school, and hauling my beaten-up skateboard with me to every class.
For adults who work in ‘knowledge economy’ jobs (technology, consulting, finance etc.), a personal brand is important because the minute you land your first job, your professional network becomes the single best tool that you have to find your next job.
And the more senior you become in these kinds of jobs, the more it is a requirement that you have a strong ‘personal brand’ - at companies like Facebook and Google, career ladder documents specify that Vice Presidents and Senior Directors should be known as ‘leaders in their industry’ outside of just the companies at which they work. So your personal brand is an integral part of your job.
The algorithm tells you what it wants
Luckily, working out how to ‘build your personal brand’ online is simple. Whatever platform you’re doing it on, just look at the type of posts that are popular and COPY THEM.
Every digital platform has algorithms that are calibrated to promote the type of content that its owners want to see - on TikTok this means short videos with an immediate hook; on Twitter it means short posts that get a lot of retweets and engagement. Machine Learning tools like ChatGPT - fed with unimaginable volumes of existing content - are making it ever-easier to optimize your posts, although the long-term effects of this ever-escalating optimization arms race remain to be seen.
While writing this piece I copy-pasted the first four posts from my LinkedIn feed that weren’t adverts:
They are a textbook distillation of the LinkedIn algorithm at work - 1) someone excited to be starting a job, 2) some leaving an amazing job, 3) someone looking forward to seeing colleagues, and 4) someone offering seemingly profound business advice.
For its part, LinkedIn wants to be seen as a platform for promoting positive professional conversations, and knows that positive career events like new jobs and promotions receive more engagement than other updates. One or two-line aphorisms about success at work (also known as ‘broetry’) are easier to understand and re-share than thoughtful essays, so they get promoted more, too.
Social media companies want you to copy other people; in fact they work tirelessly to get their users to behave in a similar way. This is known in the industry as promoting ‘mimicry’ - getting more people to behave in ways that reliably drive engagement is how these companies make most of their money.
Without careful stewardship, the wheels do inevitably come off in the long-term. Your Facebook Feed graveyard that you probably never visit anymore is a great example of the increasingly hollow and repetitive experience that can be created. But that is a problem for the company rather than you; users always have new platforms to which they can migrate.
What does it cost?
Practically, what this means for your personal brand is that you have a choice - if you want to be defined as a deep-thinking, platitude-avoiding professional engaged in thoughtful discourse, your online following will grow slowly and never be vast. Realistically, you can aspire to be someone like Scott Alexander of Astral Codex fame - highly respected within a sizable but specific niche. Some career intellectuals, like Nassim Taleb, do maintain almost 1 million followers on Twitter. To do that though, you would have to write a New York Times bestseller - achieve notable success for something outside of your social media following.
On the other hand, if you don’t care about posting solely thoughtful, intellectual content, and your primary goal is simply to become more well-known and re-shared, the smart and rational course of action is to post more generic, shallow and optimistic content - it appeals to more people and more people will engage with it.
On Twitter and LinkedIn, Adam Grant and Lex Fridman may be the pre-eminent examples of conforming to the fortune-cookie factory. Grant is a professor at Wharton and Fridman teaches at MIT, so neither is an intellectual slouch. Yet their social media feeds have approximately the intellectual depth of an embroidered wall-hanging, or the motivational quotes in a downtown yoga studio.
Even well-known influencers like Grant or Fridman have very little agency when it comes to being seen online. So much of our behavior on social media is coerced by the way the company ranks what we post, that If their content did not tend towards generic, fortune-cookie-like statements, it simply would not be seen and promoted.
In a very real way, the dilemma is not new. Politicians have known for centuries (millenia?) that appealing to a broader group of people requires a simplification of the message. Summed up by the webcomic SMBC:
Now, though, it isn't just politicians on the soapbox: anyone can use these platforms to build a huge following, and the algorithmic feedback loop magnifies the tendency towards ever-shallower discourse.
There are some exceptions - controversial characters whose global fame and following is such that whatever they say will go viral; think people like Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, or Kanye West. But if you’re one of the richest men in the world, or a controversial ex-President, or…Kanye west, your existing global reach means that you are primarily concerned with using your brand over carefully building it.
The case for deeper interactions
As well as a well-examined ‘dumbening’ of discourse online, these algorithms create an overall flattening of individual identity. Ironically, in an age where companies are at pains to burnish their ‘diversity’ credentials, their platforms are geared towards creating a generic type of person, rather than promoting different styles or ways of being.
You probably experience this when you switch between social networks. Photos you post on Twitter are probably less personal than those you’d share on Instagram, but likely too personal for you to feel comfortable sharing them on LinkedIn. There is a sense of personal comfort over what you’re willing to share, but ‘who you are’ on each platform is also conditioned by an understanding of what will be popular, and what people will engage with.
What to do? Personally, I feel a strong resistance to adding more fortune-cookie aphorisms to the feed in pursuit of followers and reach - on a personal level it feels ‘out of character’, and on a cultural level I have an (admittedly judgmental) sense that it is ‘bad for society’.
As a relatively senior worker in a knowledge economy industry, I believe I can build and maintain a strong personal brand that feels ‘true’ to myself through a mixture of 1) relationships built in the workplace (through meetings or Zoom calls), 2) 1:1 time with people I like and respect, and 3) an online social media presence that feels true to myself - thoughtful blog posts, cheering on and helping others online, and regular 1:1 correspondence (emails and such) with folks I’m close to.
I am self-selecting out of being the next Adam Grant or Lex Fridman, but I really don’t have a particular inclination to create the kind of content or maintain the kind of social media presence required to be them. In an era of increasing mindfulness and conscious disconnection, maybe people opting out of the coming ChatGPT battleground in online content in favor of more disconnection is no bad thing, and might in fact become its own status symbol.
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