I spent the better part of 2019 sitting in a cramped, windowless apartment in Chicago trying to become a ‘thought leader’ on Twitter. I had the schedule. I had the threads. I even had those stupid emojis that everyone tells you to use to increase ‘engagement.’ By October, I had 5,000 followers and a bank account that was effectively screaming for help. I was famous to a bunch of strangers who didn’t care about me, and I was invisible to the people who actually hire for the kind of work I do.
It was a total waste of time.
The biggest lie we’ve been sold in the last decade is that your ‘brand’ is synonymous with your follower count. It isn’t. In fact, for most of us who work in ‘general’ roles—operations, project management, the stuff that keeps the world turning—being loud on social media can actually be a liability. It makes you look like you have too much free time. It makes you look like a performer rather than a doer.
The night I realized my followers were useless
I remember sitting at a bar with a guy who runs a mid-sized logistics firm. I was trying to impress him with my ‘reach.’ I showed him a tweet that had gone semi-viral—something about ‘synergy’ or some other garbage I didn’t actually believe. He looked at my phone, took a sip of his beer, and said, ‘That’s nice, but can you actually fix my supply chain leak?’
I couldn’t. Not with a tweet. I realized then that I was building a brand for other brand-builders, not for clients or employers. I was trapped in a circle-jerk of content creation. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. I was playing a game where the only prize was more of the game. I quit Twitter that night. I didn’t announce it. I just deleted the app and went to bed.
I know people will disagree with this, and they’ll point to the one-in-a-million person who got a CEO job because of their TikTok, but for 99% of us, that’s a lottery ticket. And I’m not a gambler.
The ‘Proof of Work’ strategy (and why Notion is a trap)
If you aren’t posting on social media, how do people know you’re good? You show them. Directly. I call this the ‘Proof of Work’ strategy, though I’m sure some marketing guru has a more expensive name for it. Instead of shouting into the void, you create high-value artifacts that live in the real world.
For me, this meant building a private folder of ‘case studies’ that were actually just honest post-mortems of projects I’d worked on. I’m talking about the gritty stuff. ‘Here is how I messed up the Q3 rollout, and here is the spreadsheet I built to make sure it never happens again.’ That spreadsheet? That’s my brand. Not a headshot with a ring light.
Your brand is the trail of solved problems you leave behind you, not the noise you make while you’re working.
I used to think I needed a fancy website for this. I spent $4,200 on a ‘brand consultant’ in 2021 who told me I needed a custom Notion dashboard to showcase my skills. Total scam. I genuinely despise Notion for this. People spend 40 hours a week building ‘dashboards’ with pretty icons instead of doing the actual work. It’s a productivity cult for people who like to play house. I eventually just moved everything to a simple Google Drive folder. It’s ugly, it’s functional, and it works.
42 emails and a spreadsheet
I decided to test this. Over a period of three months, I sent 42 hyper-specific emails to people I actually respected in my industry. No ‘let’s grab coffee’ fluff. No ‘I’d love to pick your brain.’ I hate those phrases. I would find a specific problem they were likely facing and send a one-page PDF of how I’d solve it, based on my past experience. I tracked the results in a spreadsheet (solely because I’m a nerd about sole wear and data, much like how I track the tread depth on my boots every winter—currently 4mm on my left heel, if you’re wondering).
- Emails sent: 42
- Responses: 29
- Actual meetings: 12
- Job/Project offers: 4
That’s a 10% conversion rate into actual money. Compare that to the 0% I was getting from my 5,000 Twitter followers. It turns out, when you solve a problem for someone for free, they tend to remember your name. Who would have thought? Anyway, I digressed. The point is that these 42 people now form the core of my ‘brand.’ They don’t follow me on Instagram, but they call me when they have a problem. That is the only metric that matters.
Why I refuse to use Linktree
This is going to sound petty, and it probably is, but I refuse to recommend Linktree or any of those ‘link in bio’ tools. I actively tell my friends to avoid them. To me, a Linktree is the digital equivalent of a cheap, flimsy business card you find on the floor of a convention center. It says, ‘I have a lot of things to show you, but none of them are important enough to have their own home.’
If you want a brand, give people one thing to look at. A single, well-written PDF. A single, thoughtful email. A single, successful project. Don’t give them a menu of your social media profiles. It’s distracting and, frankly, it looks desperate. I’ve bought the same $120 black notebook four times now for my meeting notes. I don’t care if something ‘smarter’ or ‘digital’ exists; the consistency of that one notebook is my brand in those meetings. People recognize it. It’s my ‘thing.’ Linktree is the opposite of that. It’s a mess.
I might be wrong about this. Maybe some people love clicking through a list of links to find a mediocre ‘About Me’ page. But I doubt it.
Building a brand without social media is slower. It’s quieter. It’s much more work because you can’t just ‘schedule’ it on a Sunday afternoon. You have to actually be good at your job. You have to talk to people. You have to follow up. You have to be the person who sends the ‘I saw this and thought of your project’ email six months after a meeting. It’s manual labor.
But the floor is much higher. When the algorithm changes or a billionaire buys your favorite platform and turns it into a dumpster fire, your brand doesn’t disappear. It lives in the inboxes and minds of the people you’ve actually helped.
I wonder if we’ll all just look back on the ‘social media era’ as a collective fever dream where we forgot how to talk to each other. I don’t know the answer to that. I just know that I’m a lot happier now that I don’t have to care what a stranger in a different time zone thinks about my ‘content.’
Stop posting. Start helping. That’s the whole trick.