Do you want to be an influencer or part of a community?
“You’re the kindest and most supportive person I’ve ever met online.”
“I love having built that bond of trust with other great accounts like yours; I think that’s what’s truly valuable about being here.”
I recently received these messages on an Instagram account where I talk about books and connect with people who share the same interests. It’s not that I was born trustworthy; receiving these messages was the result of a conscious and consistent effort.
I must admit I don’t use LinkedIn as much as Instagram, but the dynamics I see aren’t all that different. Both platforms are governed by an algorithm that prioritises accounts with high levels of engagement (likes, comments, and shares), even if this comes at the expense of content that is superficial, generic, or designed to stir up our emotions in a simple, yet often unnecessary, way. On LinkedIn, these accounts prioritised by the algorithm are known as ‘Top Voices.' On other platforms, we simply call them 'influencers.'
When you’re aiming to enter or progress in the corporate world, you’re told that ‘being active on LinkedIn’ is a must. Consequently, the first thing you do is visit it more often, to see what people are posting. And what LinkedIn shows you is what its algorithm prioritises, so when you try to ‘be active’, you post things similar to what influencers have posted, because, from seeing them so often, you’ve understood that these are the community’s unwritten norms, the way you have to behave to be part of it. You ask for likes, followers, and comments because that’s what influencers do. You have to play by the algorithm’s rules, don’t you?
No.
At least, it isn’t a requirement if you aren’t, or don’t want to be, an influencer. And you don’t have to aspire to become one to be part of a community. Communities are networks of people connected by bonds. When we adopt influencers’ codes, we also adopt their focus on metrics and on being a referent. We adopt the desire to create asymmetrical bonds: to have followers, not equals. This results in hierarchies, not communities.
Encouraging online interaction without being interested in what interaction actually entails on a human level (conversations, questions, genuine interest in the responses) may help us become influencers, but it does not help us create and maintain a community, because communities are based on symmetrical bonds.
A symmetrical relationship requires commitment, honesty and generosity. This is the work that made the authors of the messages see me as someone who radiates kindness and reliability. I don’t want to be an influencer; I want to be part of a community. So this is what I do:
- Sharing the work of others who do want to be influencers or use their social media as a professional platform. If they’ve already said it better than I can, and if boosting their metrics is going to help them achieve their personal or professional goals, why should I repeat the same message? Do I need the clicks and likes that others will benefit more from? (No, I don’t).
- Dedicating time and attention to what the people I follow post. This involves reading posts right to the end before liking them, and then commenting or messaging the author privately. This serves two purposes. The first is purely selfish: to satisfy my need for human connection and my curiosity about other people’s minds. The second is more altruistic: I neither need nor want them to remember my name; I want people who create and speak from a genuine desire not to stop doing so simply because they feel nobody cares.
- Posting what I want, when I want, rather than bowing to the whims of a fickle algorithm. This allows me to live free from its shackles, but it is also a conscious decision regarding my public image. Our social media profiles reflect who we are and how we want to be perceived. And I aim to be someone who speaks when they have something to say, not just to fill the silence; someone who values the attention others are paying to their words.
Focused on optimising metrics rather than on communicating, we churn out vast amounts of content that we value so little that we delegate its creation to an AI. We engage in this mass content production because we believe it is the unwritten code of social media, how we must behave on these platforms to belong. But this is a misguided view: algorithms are the rules set by influencers, not by communities.
Belonging to a community is not determined by some temporary algorithm evaluation but by the depth and strength of the bonds that unite us with the rest of the members. These bonds cannot be created or maintained through interactions lacking in personality; generative AI posts and suggested comments are like lift conversations about the weather. Flooding our profiles with this generic content shows that we’re not interested in building bonds, that we prioritise fitting into a formula over considering whether we have anything worth saying.
Apart from that, what does it say about our values, our experience, our perspective? Is there something in that content that allows those who see it to form a picture of us as a human rather than as a product? And what does it say about how we view the other people in our network?
Want to know a little more about who wrote this article? 👇
She studied Psychology and completed a Master’s in Research Methodology so that the questions she never stops asking, herself and others, are as useful and accurate as possible. For a while, she applied this search for answers in Data Analytics, and she now applies it to debugging code and software.