social media is good for your career unless you're cringe
posting five times a week and leaning into the new trend don't make up for the lack of talent
Social media got me my first job. When I just moved to the US for college, I was desperate for a job on campus but every student office and even Starbucks kept telling me they just hired all the people they needed for the semester. I made a YouTube video about my experience as an international student at my college for an unrelated scholarship program and posted it on my college’s international student center’s Facebook group (remember those?) to ask people to support it. I never got the scholarship, but the next time I came by the office to ask if they had any openings, the head of the international student program said that he saw my YouTube video and offered me a job on the spot. I stayed at that job for two years!
A recurring theme in my life is seeing people do stuff like start a company, make a clothing line, land a talk show because of their success as a social media creator and knowing that I have the skills and the work ethics to do what they do - without undervaluing their work and grit. There are two groups of people: the ones who see social media creators, say “anyone can do this” and not do anything about it, and the ones who say “anyone can do this” and actually do the work to get there. I, for one, love instant validation, so not doing well the first time around but continuing to put in consistent work and struggling through the process of making something cool is extremely irritating to me. From doing the last problems on the math homework to running comms campaigns at work to trying to write consistently, the temptation to quit what I am doing during prolonged periods of getting little to no validation is at all-time high.
What I like about the social media creator lifestyle is not the vacations, PR hauls, or the number of followers…it’s the fact that they get to do cool shit. When I was growing up bidge-watching America’s Next Top Model on MTV, it was about casting thousands of girls from small towns across America and letting the industry turn them from a bunch of nobodies into stars. It was about giving them a new look, a modeling contract, an intro to the top people in the industry, and a national TV level of public exposure - basically, giving a boost to these girls’ modeling talent. Today, a modeling course includes a social media course because just talent doesn’t cut it as much in the industry that’s built to sell, when you are competing with people that have a social media following and therefore, an automatic distribution channel for the brands they work with.
Any ambitious professional in any industry is trying to build some kind of social media presence whether it’s by writing posts on LinkedIn, tweeting and deleting on tech twitter, filming the progress of a fashion school project for TikTok, or making Canva infographics for a non-profit’s IG. Instead of dropping off headshots at a modeling agency or emailing some big guy in the music industry, people grow their social media following hoping to get attention from the right people and get that extra career boost that the industry is built to provide. Social media opens doors, puts you in people’s phones and on people’s minds, but it also creates a ton of opportunities for you to slip up.
These days people understand that social media is more than just a weird hobby - it is monetizable in a way that is unproportional to other people’s jobs. Even if you don’t want to make social media your full time job, you can use it to get jobs or to get attention that helps you get jobs.
The cat is out of the bag, I know. But it still baffles me that the by-product of creating cool stuff - whether it’s music, photography, apps, clothes, films, interviews, research literally any kind of thought or information - getting a career boost - has taken over the original plot and made majority of stuff that people put on the internet noisy and mediocre. A lot of people post on social media not because they have a talent or a thing they want to share with the world, connect with like-minded people, or whatever Systrom and Krieger told us they wanted people on their app to do. They post because they want the by-product of putting yourself and your talent out there which is brand deals, jobs, audience, and opportunities.
Writing, for example, is very near and dear to me because I started writing on the internet when I did a foreign exchange program in high school in 2014. The year before that I was an avid reader of blogs that kids who went through the same exchange program wrote. Those blogs are what made me want to do the program, made me feel confident that I can live on my own on the other side of the world as a 16-year-old, and got me through the exchange year. When I started writing my own blog, my goal was to tell stories about my year to friends at home and to be someone who other kids can relate to and be inspired by. I also used to write sporadic blog posts in college because I wanted to be a voice for people who went through similar experiences as I did, someone they could relate to and reach out too. Never during these two blogging eras did I think about building a following or becoming a writer. I know my place and if anything, by the time I got to college writing on the internet was claimed to be ‘outdated’ (and here you are holding on to that long attention span that’s supposed to be non-existent in 2022).
Writing in the tech industry…can get you places. And surprisingly, it doesn’t even have to be that good as long as it stays consistent. Actually, it is pretty hard to find writing from non-writers on tech twitter that doesn’t read like a college essay. Writing got people followers, jobs, sponsorships, opportunities to invest and advise. A lot of people start writing not because they have thoughts they’ve decided to articulate and share, not because they are curious if anyone else shares their opinions or can challenge them but because they want the jobs, the sponsorship, and the opportunities. They don’t write stuff that’s cool, interesting, different, maybe even difficult to write about but the stuff that’s gonna resonate with most people, make them likable, get the most likes and clicks.
I will lie if I say these things don’t ever cross my mind. It’s a consistent struggle to push myself to make stuff for the sake of making stuff and treating the ‘getting to do cool shit part’ as a by-product. It’s hard to stay in your lane and write about stuff that’s interesting to me rather than trendy (at times, those collide), make videos that are different from ‘what works’, take the longer road without setting high hopes in a world where millions of people are doing and telling you to do the opposite. I’ve got a sneaky suspicion though that the longer road is the one that’s going to prove to be more sustainable, fulfilling, and fruitful. But even if it doesn’t, I am here for the road.
psst…here are some of my favorite creators who are in it not just for the by-product:
This really hits! I’ve been recently thinking about this as well, looking for an answer why even bother, but it’s so worth it!