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

by Mikko Alasaarela

People respond to people, not always to abstract ideas (no matter how impressive an idea it is). To capitalize on connections, tell about personal experiences so that people learn who you are, who you work with, and why you do what you do. The other people in the conversation likely know nothing about you beyond your name, and not even that if you have a pseudonymous identity.

This is a public secret. Most people don't know how to tell personal stories and don't even think about doing something like it. Yet, it’s an easy way to establish yourself as a real player in any chat group conversation. Your personal stories may also prompt others to open up, increasing the affinity and trust of the whole group.

If your conversation proves interesting enough to receive significant attention, be sure to give thanks and credit to those who add value to the conversation.

As trust between you and your network grows, people may expect you to have certain attributes that they associate with trust. One of those is authenticity, which is the next chapter's subject.

All of that growth and goodwill came out of one simple action: I was authentic, the real me, setting myself and the company up as different in an industry where inauthenticity and pseudonymity were the norms. I didn’t try to blend in. I wanted to prove that there was a better way to build blockchain communities. Many people agreed, allowing me to become a trusted industry member.

Being authentic and standing out requires finding a balance between your "brand" - what people know you for and expect from you - and your "personal touch", the empathetic presentation of your brand.

One of LinkedIn’s most important profile features, Creator Mode, is essential for your goal of becoming an influencer and thought leader. Turn that on because it will bring you followers and deepen the relationship with your existing connections. For example, when you enable Creator Mode, people who send a connection request to you will follow you automatically. So you gain more followers even if you don’t accept all the connection requests. The Creator Mode also adds a follower count on your profile page, which boosts your social capital and credibility.

If you’re using LinkedIn, pay attention to the About section. By default, this section shows the visitors just the first couple of sentences, and they have to expand to read further. These sentences are essential. People will read more if they are intrigued enough to continue reading, so muster your emotional intelligence to convince the visitor to keep reading. The About space isn’t the place to create a fake professional brand—it’s a place to show authenticity.

A well-tuned profile is only the first step on your journey to thought leadership on social networks. Your success depends on the content you share and the conversations you participate in.

When you have gathered at least hundreds of followers, you can establish yourself professionally. At the core of that brand is your professional profile–not only in the sense of creating a differentiated profile on social media but also starting to communicate on the topics that you want to be influential in.

Why all the attention to communication style? Simple: Text-generating AIs can flood public walls and blogs with SEO-optimized content that uses all the right keywords. You have no chance against that tsunami of content. Therefore, you must use your biggest asset, which is that you are human. People want to talk to other people, and they crave personal, emotionally connecting stories.

My first viral social media post was an answer I wrote to a question on the small, at the time, social Q&A platform Quora. It got over 360,000 views and over 8,700 upvotes. The answer was about my life philosophy: we shouldn’t get stuck in repeating routines but rather add new experiences to our daily lives and appreciate small things like a child.

With people spending up to 12 hours a day online, there is only one scalable way to influence people today —digitally. Your ability to influence others depends on how much they see you online, which depends on the algorithmic feeds of major social media platforms.

That means you need a plan unless you want your influence to be passively controlled by an AI. In building out your plan, consider how to set your goals for your influence, leverage the different platforms and ride the waves of their particular algorithms, and use your newfound, powerful influence responsibly. A well-designed plan will set you up to turn your influence into opportunities of all kinds.

During the era of broadcast media, you could only become influential by being extremely good at something. This is what I call earned influence.

If you can game the algorithms, you don't have to be the best expert or performer in anything.

These people are famous for being famous. They have risen to influence because of their ability to hack distribution algorithms and content to be more visible on social media than other users. This is what I call manufactured influence.

To achieve mobile-friendly text, follow these simple instructions: After every second sentence, skip the next line and start a new paragraph. It may look weird to you on the desktop, but it looks amazing on mobile. Optimizing your text for mobile will rack up more views than it would have in a longer form.

Do you want to spark higher-quality conversations? Make sure the first sentence in your post draws attention.

Creating traction with your posts during the first hour greatly affects the amount of social proof, authenticity, and credibility you can build online. Share your post at a time when your followers are online and can engage.

In October 2015, Facebook announced the release of the emoji reactions. Mark Zuckerberg explained that they were there to help you better understand how your friends felt about your post. But there was another reason that he didn’t mention. Facebook wanted to know why specific types of content go viral. It was already widely known that emotional reactions gave a lift to the content shared on social media. Therefore, Facebook reasoned that if platforms could measure that reaction, they could quickly understand why a particular piece of content spread so fast.

Typically, when you concentrate on a portion of society rather than make your discussion more general, audience growth is much faster.

In brief, the upsides to influencing a partisan group include: ● Your audience is easier to grow and manage. ● You’re speaking to the choir, so there is less friction between you and the members ● Group members get along well, so conversations are easy to start and continue.

Group members tend to exhibit what psychologists call confirmation bias. The self-affirmation and support found in the group make it difficult to entertain outside ideas and perspectives.

You can be partisan and bubble-bursting at the same time.

The bubble-bursting approach creates opportunities for conversations to turn ugly. You must muster considerable empathy and patience to manage such a group.

Are there any future-proof ways to create content that leads to thought leadership? Yes. It is all about sparking conversations. People like to engage in conversations–it practically defines what it is to be human.

If you are the regular conversation starter in your area of expertise, you are also the de-facto thought leader.

Let’s start with the basics. And don’t worry that you’re starting from scratch. You’ll have time, even if you’re just starting, to build up your conversational skills.

Do participate in public conversations initiated by relevant industry influencers. When you join conversations initiated by the people respected in the industry, you become affiliated with these people. That connection lifts your relevance within the industry simply because you are part of the conversation and their industry. This is especially useful because it doesn’t require that you have any initial starting level–you can be a beginner with no experience whatsoever. You build your visibility when you contribute quality, timely comments to the right conversations.

Do start public conversations regularly in your area of expertise and engage in the conversations to keep them active. Once you are comfortable with starting conversations, you should. Open discussions about timely and relevant topics, and pull in industry influencers to create value for the whole community around you. When people in your industry look forward to your conversation openers, you have achieved a level of thought leadership. Once you start a conversation, be an active part of it. If you just share and abandon your posts, people will think of you as a content scheduler bot and disengage.

Do share positively about your encounters with relevant people. A key issue in public conversations is the building of affinity. When you meet someone in real life (at a conference, for example), share positively about that encounter. This way, you offer the stage to the person you met while creating a positive link between you. If you do this kind of sharing in public, it builds your sta...

Do not send invites to potential clients with a cold sales pitch. The worst way to build your network is to send potential customers an invite that’s actually a cold sales pitch. This isn’t a good way to build a relationship, and it will make you look like a spammer. Conduct the lead-up to a sale in a private conversation after you’ve built some real-world trust with the person.

Do not ask first because giving first builds trust. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Don’t ask for help or connection before giving something.

As you achieve more visibility, it brings along with it the context that a headhunter or other hiring agent needs to make an initial assessment of your talents. And if hiring agents take an initial look into your background, they make a note of your participation and inevitably draw the conclusion that you’re part of the conversation in the industry. You create a perception (which you should reinforce with your conversations) that you can be a trusted partner.

For example, you may value a diverse community. That means that along with all the other identifiers people use to define themselves, you might also champion diverse perspectives, beliefs, and opinions. That basic value defines the self-selection community members adopt–if some potential community members don't accept the belief in and practice of diversity, it's hard for them to be part of that community.

As part of community growth, remaining flexible in allowing the community to spawn subcultures will ease the pressure of the larger community’s boundaries.

Within any culture, as within any community, some members will be more active than others. Take care of your most active members–your cultural ambassadors–with VIP rooms and VIP treatment. Consider making them admins for the community’s social network activity. The shared values at work among VIP members should align with the shared values of the entire community.

You may want to reward your VIPs beyond providing them their own space and with a recognized voice in the community. Don’t pay them a wage. As soon as you start paying them regularly, they will see their role as a job. This will lose the cultural and social capital built into the VIP status. Give gifts if you like, or find other ways to recognize their contributions–but don’t turn their passion into a job.

Without notifications, fostering an engaged conversation with your community is impossible.

A big difference between chat platforms like Discord or Telegram and a wall-based community platform like Facebook groups is that the experience on chat platforms is more real-time. That actually makes a difference in relationship building. You feel like you know the person chatting with you in real-time more than you feel about someone who leaves a comment on your wall post 3 hours after you posted it.

Give First–It’s the Only Way

On the other hand, a positive giver-taker ratio creates a huge multiplier that also amplifies your organization's value.

Community rules have to implement the community’s values, giving members an incentive to subscribe to them when joining. Along with rules, encourage users to behave in ways that make the community safer and better. Ask members to help each other. Let the members see the community as a common cause, not just a group. Rules combined with recommendations will make your community a safe, trusted, and caring space for its members.

Quick removal of people who create trouble in the community suggests and reinforces for other members that the rules do matter–not because it’s a means of control but because it’s a means of creating a safe space for everyone to participate. I’ve done this myself many times, and every time the atmosphere in the community has improved due to the removal of the troublemaker.

From that perspective, I could see myself and imagine others as being on a journey to become “servant leaders,” a phrase coined by Robert Greenleaf in his seminal 1970 essay, “The Leader as Servant.” As you might have guessed already, the title of this book, The Servant Influencer, arises from the concept of servant leadership applied to influencing.

Tony Alessandra and Michael O’Connor suggest the platinum rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated.”

You can also take a completely different path and host small, intimate dinners for neighbors and friends. Look for the joy in the connections that unite us.

In the realm of social media and in the more immediate world of real-world social relations, try to be a force for good by not glorifying extremes. People don’t react well to extremes. When they are confronted with an extreme position or argument, or treatment, they tend to respond emotionally. That’s just how humans are wired–fight or flight–to behave in confrontations. And that’s why social media sometimes feels so toxic. Always try to add balance.

Just find a way to express and act on your passions in ways that don’t spark a confrontation.