My Experience on Building a Personal Brand

Social media is absolutely a drug.

I've noticed a rash of posts, possibly due in part by my own influence on the YouTube algorithm, detailing "dopamine fasts" wherein someone puts their phone away, stays off of social media and in general avoids all of the dopamine stimulations of the modern era. I'm very much considering doing it myself.

However, social media has been an incredibly important tool in my growth financially. I began on Twitter, where I've amassed a humble following of 10 thousand followers. Relative to Twitter and even relative to the circles I run in, that's nothing, but to someone who graduated from a high school class of 205, I'm doing pretty well! I've used Twitter to build a personal brand around myself. More people know me as Viking_Sec than as Mitch. People recognize me from interactions we've had online far more often than people who know me from "meatspace." I actually got my first job from a recommendation on Twitter, the job that kickstarted my career.

Then I moved to Twitch, a livestreaming platform meant primarily for gaming but that I used for podcasts, charity events and hacking livestreams. I enjoyed a relative amount of success on Twitch before leaving the platform due to time constraints. I didn't make much (only a couple hundred bucks in a couple months) but it was enjoyable and it helped me build my personal brand.

My next move was to YouTube, my current space for content development. YouTube is a fantastic and flawed medium for building a personal brand: with the right personality, you can garner massive audiences of people who enjoy watching you for you, who enjoy the content you put out. You can also make a fair bit of money. I'm not monetized yet but the estimated sums of income that peers in the same space are making are pretty substantial.

Underlying all of this, and a point that I think my fellow Indie Hackers can benefit from, is that every platform I moved to, I brought a pretty substantial following with me from other platforms. When I moved from Twitch to YouTube, a large portion of my base followed me. When I moved to YouTube and announced it on Twitter, a very large portion of my traffic on YouTube came from announcements I posted on Twitter.

This is because I built a personality and personal brand on Twitter, using genuine interactions and conversations with people. You don't have to be annoying or market-y or anything like that. You don't have to do follow-for-follows every day for months. Talk about your space, join conversations, build relationships and establish a brand on a social media site and you'll find a free marketing audience that genuinely enjoys your content. You'll find friends to chat with in future customers. That's a pretty great combo in my opinion!