Authenticity beats virality

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Shortcuts.

Shortcuts are attractive.

Who doesn’t want overnight success?

Marketers know this. I’m a Marketer too. The first lesson we Marketers learn when we start the practice — outside the classroom — is to talk about your customer’s pain.

If you manage to strike the chord, your customer will listen.

The complication, of course, is that … most people don’t understand their pains well enough. It’s painful to think about your pains. You just want to do away with them.

In today’s issue

• Why you don’t need to go viral

• Why we stopped measuring our social media analytics

• How authenticity beats virality any day

• Update on our Personal Branding Cohort

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Virality is overrated

We’ve all envied the 16-year social media star who became viral from a single tiktok or a meme video, and became an influencer. We all know the other side of the story too. Overnight successes rarely end well.

You want fame because you don’t want to worry about losing your job. It’ll be good to have people on your side. 

You want fame because you want an endless stream of customers lined up for your product or service. You won’t have to worry about bankruptcy or calling it quits.

You want fame because you want to be seen, heard, and valued — for who you are.

And above all, you want fame because you want to build RELATIONSHIPS with people that you actually want to surround yourself with.

How many of these desires require virality?

None.

Virality is a fast-degenerating alpha

The underlying idea behind optimizing for virality is finding gaps in the algorithm.

The hooks that are working today will stop working a few months from now because all the big content creators would’ve abused the hell out of them.

And it works for them. It’s their full-time job to figure out what new flashy thing will work today. And they can ride the wave, in no small thanks to the audience that they’ve already built.

Trying to copy them when you barely even have an audience is a recipe for … crickets.

On the flip side, algorithms always trying to optimize against this trend.

Linkedin, for example, doesn’t care how well you can ‘hook’ people if they don’t spend enough time reading your content. And then engaging with it. You can follow every best practice in the world but if your content fails to resonate with your audience, it will flop.

The reason why “professional content creators” get so much reach is .. they have a set up a Ponzi Scheme. I will talk about it in some other newsletter issue. For now, it suffices to understand that there are WhatsApp groups of content creators where you can gain entry if you engage with the creators long enough to build trust (or you can shortcut your entry by paying a small fee) where everybody engages with everybody else’s content.

This is not a dig at the content creators. It works for them and it helps them get the massive reach that is beneficial to their profession. But they shouldn’t be your role model: you have other things to do than waste hours learning the algorithmic hacks.

Why we stopped looking at our social media metrics

When we started Ertiqah, we began maintaining a record of all the posts we made and their 7-day performance. Eventually, we turned into a monthly performance because record-keeping on a weekly cadence was hard (and we had other things too!)

After a month of posting, we made a table of all our high-performing posts. And this is what we found:

• Most of them were videos which included Junaid’s ‘face’

• All of them were deeply authentic posts, speaking about our firsthand experience, perspective, or story

If it were only the first, we could assume that the algorithm is just pushing videos.

But there were a lot of posts that were just text (or had a single image) that received 2K+ impressions (which is a lot considering that Junaid’s profile had been inactive for a while).

The common theme: Authenticity.

Authenticity beats virality any day

To test out our hypothesis, I rebooted my own profile.

My goal was: We will not make a single ‘value post’ or follow any best practices apart from having a hook and just spacing things out.

All of the posts I’ve written this month so far were pure spur-of-the-moment.

Of course, I still leveraged AI extensively, thanks to the ‘second brain’ approach we take with AI which helped me retain my voice even through AI. Will share more on this approach in our cohort.

The results?

With a measly 3K follower count (it just hit 3K as of writing this newsletter).

Now I’ll admit: it wasn’t just posting. I did rely a lot on commenting extensively. And this is one ‘algorithm hack’ that’s absolutely necessary to do well on Linkedin. I spent 30 mins commenting every day.

Value posting works, in moderation only

This is not to say that you should only talk about yourself or your story.

There is still a place for value posting & best practices.

You don’t want to sound self-absorbed.

The holy grail of quality posting:

Combining value with your own perspective.

It’s hard to get right. But not impossible.

With the right systems in place, you can churn out your own perspectives en masse.

That’s why we are doing the Personal Branding Cohort. So we can put all our knowledge of delivering “Authenticity at Scale”. 

Update on the cohort

We got a massive response! 🎉 

100 sign ups in 3 days!

Which is a … problem. Because originally my plan was just to have 10 people.

We are planning to cater to this problem by:

• Recording all our livestreams and sharing with our mailing list every Thursday

• Compiling all the materials and uploading them on YouTube

• Giving gated access to the Discord server to everyone who signed up

• Eventually opening the server to everyone in our mailing list (after the cohort, most likely)

What do you guys think about it?

We are 100% sure about the first 2 things. We don’t want to keep this knowledge gated. Let us know your thoughts about the Discord server.

PS sign ups are still open btw. People who sign up will get access to all the materials without waiting for the Thursday editions. You can share this link with your friends:

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