The Servant Influencer: Harness the Power of Social Media for Positive Impact

by Mikko Alasaarela

As welcome and life-affirming as those goals are, the most profound goal, the one that changed me completely, was to become wise.

Instead of comforting lies, I sought unpleasant truths. Over time, many of my firm beliefs came crashing down.

Wisdom requires more than a superficial knowledge of various disciplines. You also need to build skills in various areas of intelligence, most importantly in an area that Daniel Goleman popularized as emotional intelligence[4]. I define emotional intelligence as being able to understand and interpret your motives and emotions and put yourself in another person’s situation. If you learn to do that, you can be friends with people of almost all backgrounds, cultures, and trades.

Having a diverse set of friends is incredibly rewarding, and it certainly makes life a more colorful experience.

Have you noticed that creating a healthy, constructive debate on almost any topic on social media has become next to impossible, as people from different sides mostly trade insults and jabs without trying to find any common ground? Almost anything you post results in some people canceling and blocking you. The real problem with that isn’t about your ego; it’s that your social bubble becomes narrower every time someone with differing views cancels you.

These argumentative, divisive interactions are by design, not our own. Our worldview narrows every time we comment or react to a post, and algorithms reconfigure to feed us more of the same in a positive light (and consequently more of the opposite side in a negative light). We limit our learning potential by blocking people with different opinions. We lose our ability to negotiate and compromise and chances to learn emotional intelligence.

We need less mindless scrolling and more intellectual debate and healthy conversations.

Google engineer Blake Lemoine stared at the screen before him. He had been having a conversation with LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and it felt increasingly alive. As told by Nitasha Tiku in The Washington Post, he asked questions about religion, and the AI responded by talking about its rights and personhood. It appeared to fear death or being “turned off”.[7]

Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus that humans are essentially a collection of biological algorithms shaped by millions of years of evolution[9]. He claims that there is no reason to think that non-organic algorithms couldn’t replicate and surpass everything that organic algorithms can do.

Max Tegmark echoes the same in his book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence[10]. He makes an interesting case that we can replicate practically all intelligence on other platforms outside the human brain. In that case, sensory information is not limited to human senses, and intelligence is not limited by the boundaries of the human brain.

Generally speaking, people’s emotional intelligence is often underdeveloped. Our biological systems produce default responses to many situations, freeing us to use our cognitive abilities elsewhere. In real-life situations, we often fail at using emotional intelligence. Overcoming our biological traits requires practice.

Most of us are ignorant about even the most basic emotional triggers we set off in others. We end up in pointless fights, dismiss good arguments because they go against our biases, and judge people based on stereotypes. For example, if we meet a person in religious clothing, we might assume their worldview to be our stereotypical view of that religion.

APIs have been a way to unleash the power of data as a tool for us humans to be more productive. And now people have become APIs themselves–biology in service of technology.

This evolution has given birth to a whole new class of developers whose job is to develop algorithms that grab your attention, keep you engaged, extract data about you, make you perform tasks, and convert you from being a free user to a paying customer. In short, these developers want to build an API to your mind.

Throughout human history, cultures have evolved and spread through memes[17], which are cultural analogs to genes. Memes shape our cultural evolution.

The 1980s brought a major growth of violence in TV, movies, and popular video games, resulting in an average American kid seeing 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time they turn 18[18].

Former Facebook executive Eugene Wei blogged once that people are status-seeking monkeys.

A massive low-quality information overload is being filtered by algorithms that optimize for the total viewing time, not for the truth value of the content.

Dopamine-driven content consumption has changed the way people grow their influence. You don’t succeed on social media by offering substance, writing quality posts, or speaking the truth. You succeed by sharing bold, crazy, but most of all, meme-worthy content. Truth be damned. Donald Trump won the US presidency partly because his tweets were the most meme-worthy ones that consistently went viral, keeping him in the spotlight at all times.

If an AI-generated academic research article is accepted by a peer-reviewed journal, how can everyday media consumers identify whether the stories they read are the result of human observation or are written by an AI? Just imagine all the possible ways artificial intelligence can manipulate us by mimicking human behavior. You can already use it to respond to, amplify, debate, and react to human communication on social media at a massive scale.

Are You Building an Audience or a Community? Many people confuse the terms audience and community. Companies might hire community managers to help message their audience, and influencers may call their audience a “community”. When you or your company shares something, and others react to it, we are talking about an audience. Instagram account is an audience. Facebook page is an audience. TikTok or YouTube channel is an audience. Each share is a one-to-many broadcast with the influencer at the center of attention.

In other words, some social platforms are great for audience building, while others focus on community building.

It’s exceedingly hard to build thought leadership for a company account, so I don’t recommend trying to do that.

Five main networking models have developed throughout social network evolution: the friend model, the follower model, the interest-based model, the group model, and, most recently, the algorithmic model.

However, if you are able to become an influencer on these platforms, or if you are a celebrity bringing your followers on these platforms, you can shape opinions and behavior on a large scale.

Importantly to the servant influencer: even if you can dominate a topic, you won’t have direct access to the topic’s following. The emphasis remains on the topic, not the people who joined the conversation. And that emphasis makes it hard to build relationships.

However, trust is inversely correlated with the size of the community.

Both TikTok and YouTube allow you to subscribe to your favorite creators. But the auto-play (YouTube) and for-you-page (TikTok) algorithms give a real viral lift to the content that attracts reactions.

success of your posts depends on how well you can tap into the viral undercurrents inside the algorithms.

Instead, this book focuses on helping you help others.

You are an entrepreneur on a mission. You are a creator and want to make a difference. You want to advocate a cause that you deeply care about. You want to learn and educate people.

Discord is better for community building, but for B2B products, the fit is not great because Discord’s main user base is gamers, developers, and crypto/NFT enthusiasts.

In November 2021, Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist, found himself unemployed. He was fired, together with his colleagues, from his job at the Kyiv Post, the largest English-language newspaper in Ukraine. That was the start of the Kyiv Independent[22]. The reporters had no funding or resources, but people loved them so much that they got their first office space, legal services, and hosting for free. A couple of months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Illia, who calls himself “a village guy from Donbas”, started sharing relatable and often emotional stories of the war on Twitter. He quickly became the person to follow for English-language commentary on the war in Ukraine. He went from ten thousand followers to a million followers rapidly. As a defense reporter, he became bigger than most newspapers. Illia hasn’t wasted his newfound popularity. He has tirelessly promoted charities and organized fundraisers for various humanitarian causes.

To get yourself started on the influencer path, send up to 100 invites a week. That’s the limit that LinkedIn allowed in 2022. It may sound like a lot of work, but here’s a tip: You don’t need to include any kind of greeting with your invite. It’s usually better if you don’t because people often think you're trying to sell them something if you add a message. If you want, you can add a thoughtful comment on a person’s post and then send the invite without a text to make the invite more timely. Chances are a lot of people will accept your invite as simple networking.

Furthermore, you don’t just send invites randomly. Send your invites to people who have lots of common friends with you. This focus on network overlap is important in the early phases when you have a small number of connections.

You can use this tactic until you hit LinkedIn’s maximum connection limit of 30,000.

Below, I will show you a three-part strategy for growing your LinkedIn base, including your profile, content, and some “special moves” to boost your presence. First things first–get working on that profile.

Analyze what are currently the most viral threads and learn the best practices for virality from them. Many people have grown audiences on Twitter using an algorithmic approach and simply rehashing trending topics for their own accounts–to great success. Try to create your own mix of content - don’t copy verbatim from others without crediting them.

Act fast on emerging trends since those trends on Twitter have short windows of opportunity. Once something is listed in trending topics, it is already too late.

At some point, you’ll have to use your own take on trending subjects if you want to be seen as credible and authentic. Write consistently and frequently over a period of time.

While you can follow people on TikTok, its main networking model is algorithmic. To gain followers, your task is to create content that gets recommended by the algorithm.

Helping people is the best way to gain their trust and attention. Being helpful will encourage people to be affiliated with you.

People will want to help you if you’ve helped them first. Robert Caldini labeled this rule of reciprocity as one of the six principles of persuasion. You are building a lot of social capital[24] by helping others.

Reciprocity is very important in community building. You want to give value to the community members first so that they want to reciprocate and provide value to other community members. You can read more about it in Chapter 7.

If your goal is to build working relationships with the right people (the people you believe can help you in your quest), you must first earn the trust of the people whose circle you want to join. Take the initiative to share your expertise and insights, and experiences. Post useful commentary and point to events that interest these people. Helping people is the easiest way to earn their trust and respect, and helping the rising stars of your industry is good for your own goals.

There are three main ways to help on social media: 1) participate in conversations, 2) make introductions, and 3) share positively about your encounters with others. If you consistently help people in these ways, you can boost your standing and make yourself relevant for those whom you want to add to your network - including the top rising stars in your areas of interest.

Once you have a clear idea of whom you want to add to your network, you’re ready to start commenting on their posts and engaging in their conversations. Depending on the platform you are on, you can start by following them. As you become more aware of the conversations they participate in, you can comment on their posts. Remain consistent and active. After you have commented several times (not just once or twice–you want to appear to them to be someone serious about the area and not a passerby), send them a connection request on LinkedIn. By then, they’ve acknowledged that you add value to their conversation, so there's no harm in making the invite. Once you get into the circles of big influencers, it's easier to get deeper into their conversations because you have made this reference point to bolster your credibility.

Overall, this comment-to-conversation-to-connection path is a low-cost, low-risk way of becoming part of the networks of powerful people without you being a powerful influencer yourself.

However, if you want to build more of a presence on Twitter or Mastodon, focus on making high-quality comments and retweet/reblog people who are relevant to your interests and already have a significant following.

If you decide to try, the most effective strategy you can employ is to add extremely high-quality threads and to become famous from those conversations you started. But there’s good news: on Twitter and Mastodon, you can participate in conversations and focus on growing that way to start with – you don’t have to create the circumstances for building influence all by yourself. Make high-quality conversation contributions. Quality can be measured by relevance coupled with stickiness–an emotional hit or an insightful take on the conversation. There’s some chance that your replies are seen as having an equal standing as the original post around which the conversation revolves.