How Personal Brands Are Built in the Algorithmic Era

In early September I realised I'd crossed another milestone. I'd hit 400,000 followers across platforms: Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Substack. I've had time to reflect on the journey and distilled it into a few actionable lessons, whether you're a marketer, a creator, or anyone looking to build a personal brand, or indeed a brand, in the modern algorithmic era.

This isn't gospel. Take what you need, leave what you don't, and I hope it helps. This stuff is difficult, and the least we can do is support one another if you're going to put yourself out there.

Create around a cultural idea bigger than what you sell

If you look back to the beginning of my platforms, you'll see very classical strategist content: what is an insight, what is good strategy, rating the rebrand, and so on. The problem isn't only that this content is boring. It's that it has a very narrow aperture. I was creating entirely within the boundaries of what I was trying to sell, which was brand strategy projects. There was not a lot to say there, certainly not enough to sustain a consistent, novel posting calendar.

The unlock came when I landed on a much bigger topic: society revealed through the lens of brand. That let me hone in on how I wanted to position myself, as an educator, and what I wanted people to get out of my channels. To learn about the world, how things are, and why they feel the way they do. From there I scaffold those cultural insights into brand imperatives.

A huge portion of the people who follow me don't live inside my customer profile, which is senior marketers who hold strategy budgets, brand owners, or conference organisers. Many of them live outside the marketing world altogether. But the reality of the modern algorithm is that to reach the 50,000 people you really want to talk to, you need to speak to 1,000,000. I tend to agree with Byron Sharp here. Go as big as possible.

Find a topic you can own, one that speaks directly to your expertise but universalises it. Or just own a fun cultural idea you can become known for. You can then dispense that accumulated attention and brand equity as you see fit, which leads to the next point.

Your content is a funnel

As I've gotten more experienced I've been able to create forms of content that map to three parts of the marketing funnel. It may seem like basic advice, but you should think about what you make in terms of what you want it to accomplish, and those goals are often distinct enough to warrant distinct approaches.

Awareness

This content is designed for as much mass appeal as possible, and it always tells a story about where culture is right now. Often it won't even scaffold into a brand imperative. It's pure brand building: demonstrating the way I think and see the world, bringing new people into the tent, and helping me reach people who live outside the discipline of marketing. It also keeps my account tagged as a high performer, which helps with algorithmic distribution for the more niche pieces.

Consideration

This is closest to classical thought leadership. I'll deconstruct a cultural phenomenon and then tie it into how brands need to show up differently. Like all thought leadership, it's about getting people who already follow to lean in and think deeper. It tends to be the kind of piece shared most actively on LinkedIn, between my actual peers. The goal is to build associations around authority that get activated later. Most commonly, conference organisers cite this type of content when they reach out.

Acquisition

This is specialised content about brand and marketing strategy with little or no cultural angle. I'll dig into org structure, incentives, and comms models, and it generally ends with an actual call to action: get in touch to book a keynote or a strategy project. Less than 10% of what I make is acquisition oriented. It always performs poorly, but it ignites a lot of real conversations.

Content as practice

Social media is a flat playground where past and future are obliterated. The only thing that seems to matter to the audience is what you're saying in the moment. Legitimacy matters, but it's built after the fact. We live in a dupe culture where it's not only products that get replicated, but ideas.

People steal my video ideas, translate my scripts into other languages and repost them as their own, or set up fake accounts. This is unavoidable. But if you're good, it doesn't matter, because you've already moved on.

I make money off my perspective. The better the perspective, the more I make. And content is a way of developing my perspective. It is a practice as much as it is an outcome.

Each week as I script, I'm constantly refining existing perspectives, reading a lot of other thinkpieces and entertainment and literature, and synthesising something new. This feeds the flywheel of the whole business. New content might one day become a keynote, which can be fragmented into more content, which might be the idea that hooks someone into a strategy project.

If you only think of content as deliverables, something that has to be pumped out weekly to satisfy the algorithm, you'll burn out fast, and your well of ideas will dry up. But if you treat it as a ritual, intellectual weightlifting that strengthens the muscle of your perspective, you're cumulatively building the right to command higher margins over time. That's the only way to beat the dupes: stay two steps ahead.

Persona over authenticity

In my opinion, the worst advice you can give someone starting out is to be authentic or be yourself. Beyond being vague, social media is performative by design. What we call authenticity is itself an aesthetic that gets performed for the camera.

It's better to think of yourself as a character and ask what persona you want to give that character. I had a head start here. The character you watch in my videos is effectively my lecturer persona, an educator who wants to help people understand society through the lens of brand. There's a lot of the real me in it, but there's distance between me and that entity. That distance matters, because it shows you don't need to be an influencer. I've built a following this size while keeping my personal life personal.

Distinctive brand assets

Algorithms reward novelty within boundaries. You need to be novel enough to stand out, but too novel and you become impossible for your audience to recognise. That's where distinctive brand assets come in. A distinctive brand asset is any unique, recognisable cue that instantly triggers memory and association with a specific brand. On social, that means consistently deploying recurring visual motifs, signature editing styles, catchphrases, or a consistent tone of voice.

For me it's my face green-screened onto an image, the titles I use for my videos, and yes, even my stupid wired Mac headphones. I once had one of my worst performing videos ever, and in the post-mortem I realised it was because you couldn't clearly see any of my distinctive brand assets in the first three seconds. The power of a brand asset is cumulative. You're rewarded exponentially as familiarity builds over time. People's heads are basically an overstuffed sock drawer, and if you can get a couple of their brain cells to recall who you are, that's more than half the battle.

Synthetic versus real influence

It's important to recognise that the influence you build on social platforms is synthetic. There's an algorithmic debuff. It doesn't matter if you're getting millions of views. People will always see you as two-dimensional if all you do is post to TikTok and Instagram. You should prioritise adding other dimensions as soon as you can.

I do a lot of in-person keynote speaking, and it's one of my core revenue streams. I also saw significant growth when I wrote a couple of articles for The Guardian. Legacy publications are always thinking about how to bring in new audiences, so if you have a complementary voice there's an even exchange: they grant you legitimacy, you grant them relevance.

To step out in front of an audience each week, to be recognised in public, to travel to speak in several countries, has been a strange, dissociative process that's nonetheless been the most rewarding stretch of my career so far. I hope that through my work I've helped make learning fun again.