If You *Must*, Here is How to Be an Influencer Without Crashing Out or Losing Yourself

This posting stuff is supposed to be fun.

A lot of creative types think that they have to build a large social media presence to market their projects and network their way into a sustainable career in the arts. Many of start off seeing their digital presence as only a means to an end, or a necessary evil, but then develop a taste for it, until posting itself becomes one of their primary outlets (and energy sinks).

Other social media power-users become influencers because they have a community or a belief system they feel compelled to advocate for, and think dispensing regular memes/rants/hot takes will earn a large amount of social goodwill they’ll be able to redirect toward their desired political calls-to-action. They think they’ll be able to translate likes and shares into boots on the ground (or butts in chairs at the workshops they’re selling) in other words.

Then there’s the social media figures among us who got into posting because we were simply too lonesome or weird to bond with people in physical life, so we honed the ability to express ourselves in words or “content” because we hoped it would make us more attractive to others, or at least to fill the void of time.

Whatever drove us to get online, post regularly, and generate thousands of dollars in free advertising revenue for the likes of Meta and X, most of us influencer-types eventually come to realize the bargain that we struck wasn’t quite the one we thought we were making.

We find that the audience we’ve developed might love what we have to give away for free (or love the messy show that our public lives have become), but they don’t actually care about us, won’t take marching orders from us, and don’t meet any request that is difficult, costly, or happening off-platform.

The constantly recycling fights that we get into online might not change all that many hearts at minds, so the twentieth time that he/him lesbian discourse trickles down our feeds, we wonder if we’re making any real cultural headway or if we’re just a comfortingly repetitive entertainment, Skibidi Toilet for the angry humanities-educated set.

Or one day we have a public meltdown and lose face, then discover that the thousands of usernames we’ve counted among our friends do not care about the collective toll their individual comments and messages take (because how could they really understand that?)

At that point, all the candor and familiarity that we’ve performed might just curdle into contempt, and our illusion of being highly-connected fades, revealing us to be just as freaky, alone, and socially grasping as we always were.

I’ve been in the Internet Personality game for a very long time (I first became a digital micro-celebrity in the fourth grade, and have had dozens of viral moments since), so I’ve witnessed just about every way that being publicly online can sour or explode. I’ve collapsed under the pressure that I placed on myself to constantly produce new digital work, and from the scrutiny of tens of thousands of people, and I’m still working hard to recover from the social anxiety it’s given me.

But for the most part, I’ve been able to avoid the largest pitfalls of digital notoriety because I’ve observed what works and doesn’t work for others, set pretty firm boundaries on how I engage with complete strangers on the internet, and have pretty tempered expectations for what the work of posting can actually do for me or the world.

At this point, I know a lot of people with large social media followings (you can call that highbie nepotism if you like; I call it getting along with people who are talented and share my addictions), and I’ve seen many of them having the hard time I did.

They get overwhelmed by bad faith comments; launch a new podcast that doesn’t get many subscriptions despite their 50k follower count, then get depressed; get into meaningless fights with other influencers and say things they regret to a wide audience instead of writing it in their journal, and mistake a high follower count for the friendship, love, community, or financial stability that they’ve always longed for. Usually, posting has become so compulsive for them that they can’t find their way out, don’t even begin to question whether they should continue interacting with their massive audience until it gets so bad they have no choice but to make a change.

And so I thought I’d collect all of the strategies for surviving being a digital public figure that I’ve figured out, so that anyone aspiring to this kind of life can make what they will of it. I also think reading this guide might be helpful if you are heavy consumer of social media; A little peek behind the curtain might reveal just how self-serving and calculated absolutely everything that you see on Instagram/Bluesky/X/Youtube/TikTok really is, and give you less reason to trust any of us or buy the crap we’re selling.

So here they are, my patented tips on building and maintaining a social media presence without becoming too much of a self-absorbed demon about it or crashing out:

Post Because You Want To

Many wannabe-influencers start off using social media in a purely instrumental way: they’re a writer and they’ve heard that having a large following is essential to getting a book deal, or they care a lot about politics and think the corporate-backed social internet is the only marketplace of ideas where any meaningful exchange is happening these days.

And these beliefs are rooted in reality! I got my massive first book deal on the strength of my internet virality, and mass movement on social media can fill up streets and government offices with protestors, or cause large corporation’s stock valuations to crash. There is a real power to this fake place.

But where a lot of social media users go wrong is by treating social media like a job with external, objective standards of success. They clock in, study the trends and aesthetics that have worked well for others, reproduce the same content that does well over and over again on a regular schedule, and expect the line to go up consistently forever.

It really does not work like that. People are on social media looking mainly to be distracted or entertained, and they can smell when the posting is rote and passionless. And as much as the algorithm loves to push out the same reheated glurge over and over, users can sense when a creator does not have the artistic sauce. If what they are watching feels like rerun of a sitcom, they’ll care about it just as much as any trash on TV. Why work so hard on something with no life behind it?

Making the same tired old posts about the same handful of well-worn topics is bound to be unrewarding for most creative people, and if you’re trying to develop an “audience,” exercising your creativity was probably the original point. So I recommend approaching social media use not as some grim obligation, but as a form of play.

Try to focus on making and discussing things you’re actually interested in right now, and only post when you want to. Don’t convince yourself that the fate of the entire world or your professional future hangs on whether you made the right Labubu joke. Just hang out. Have fun. Experiment with new styles, looks, and formats. Infodump about a special interest. If you get sick of making infographics, go make glitchy video art instead.

Some of the internet’s most impactful figures are first and foremost creatives who changed up what they were doing and invented new genres long before it was popular. Neil Cicierega went from making flash animated videos, to puppet shows, to live-acted Youtube sketches, to virtuosic albums and completely transformed online culture each time. Bo Burnam churned out comedic songs that made him famous, performed in comedy clubs, directed & acted in a couple of major films, then released a magnum opus about artistic self-involvement and capitalist alienation that could be his final public word without leaving any of us wanting.

Engaging in that kind of creative fluidity is meaningful, which is better than being short-term profitable or popular, and it makes you adaptable and skillful no matter where your efforts wind up. Even if a particular project goes nowhere, the time will not be wasted because it helped you grow, and informed your future creations.

Being propelled by genuine passion rather than obligation can also prevent burnout, and as a nice side effect, work you actually enjoyed making tends to have an ineffable glimmer about it that the right audiences will pick up on, and appreciate on a deeper level. Trust me: it is better to have a dozen people write thoughtful responses to your work than to have thousands of people “like” it but barely understand it.

Image made in Canva by author.

Don’t Fuss About Metrics, Timing, or Trends

It is easy to obsess about your social media performance, because the apps provide constant feedback and pressure to grow, but offer you very little control.

The social media algorithm is designed to be a lot like a slot machine, and that’s on both ends of the consumer-creator divide: users’ most desired posts are often buried deep down in the feed in order to keep them scrolling, and creators are denied consistent access to their audiences or rewards for their performance because inconsistency breeds desperation.

This arrangement only benefits advertisers, who get more eyeballs on their sponsored content the more time we all spend online, and social media companies themselves, who lay claim to all of our attention and the AI-training data that can be mined from everything that we make on their platforms.

To cope with their lack of control, many social media users invent “rules” and “tricks” for improving engagement that amount to little more than superstition and rumor. Don’t use swear words. Censor links or mentions of Patreon. Post when everybody is on their lunch break. Include a picture of your face. There is no evidence to support any of these well-established ‘rules’ of winning at social media, and many of the biggest quirks of the algorithm are removed the second they are mastered.

Fixating on short-term metrics and fleeting “rules” of engagement hijacks the brains of people who would otherwise be focusing on the quality of their writing, photography, or art, or asking themselves deeper questions about how best to inform and persuade the public they’re trying to reach. (Often, social media is not the best outlet for a communication in the first place.) But metrics do provide a handy measure of time spent using an app. The biggest power users are not the people who use social media the best, they’re the ones who use it the most.

Ultimately, there is very little that you, a single social media creator, can control about the audience that your work finds. And before social media, this was no less true. Success is not based on effort or merit; a few decades ago, the success of a play that you wrote would have depended on the number of wealthy friends you had and a bolt of luck, and today it’s determined by a digital manifestation of the exact same.

Ultimately, we will all write absolute banger posts that flop because they came out at the wrong day or time, or the right people didn’t see them, and have ideas that people aren’t yet ready for. I could be pissed that my takes on narcissism and AI didn’t take off but Sarah Z’s and Alex Avila’s did, or I can just be happy that the right ideas won out in time.

Being able to flop with grace and continue making things anyway is the mark of lasting creativity— and it comes naturally if you are posting because you want to post, rather than posting as a means to an end. Everything tracks back to Tip #1: Only do this shit because you want to and you enjoy it, even if nothing ever comes of it.

Accept that Nobody Owes You Anything

I see a lot of established social media users crashing out over the fact that all the labor they put into building their brands doesn’t necessarily translate into things like sales, subscriptions, event attendance, jobs, or really any other outcome beyond getting more likes and follows on social media. They’ve been fed a lie that all the unpaid work they’ve invested in generating free content will somehow pay off for them, but in actuality all that they have done is condition a steadily growing user base to…expect free content from them.

I’ve fallen prey to this too. When my first book came out, I assumed that the viral success of the essay that had inspired it would guarantee good book sales. Three million people had read Laziness Does Not Exist! By the time my second and third books came out, my following was even larger, and I felt certain I would sell at least as many copies as I had followers.

This did not happen. In fact, my follower count had no clear relationship to my book sales at all. And that’s because following someone on social media (where everything is free & accessible) is very different from going to a bookshop, searching for a new release from an author, and purchasing it with your own money! I should have never expected the people who opened up Instagram and hit ‘like’ on my hundred-word rants every day to be the same people to shell out $27 for a hardcover book. Social media users are not big readers, to put it mildly.

The fact is, the people who follow you on social media aren’t there because they are fans of you. They are fans of being on social media. They would be following other accounts and liking and sharing other content if you were not there to provide it. They are looking for a short-term entertainment in the palm of their hand because they are bored on the toilet, stuck in bed with a chronic illness, unemployed and can’t afford to go to the movies, or pissed at their spouse and trying to ignore them over dinner. They are not as into you as you might think they are, and are not as influenced by you as you hope.

Many a digital content creator comes to this revelation, after they try to sell tickets to a guided tour of Athens with some predatory influencer outings company, or quit their job to launch a Substack and come out of it penniless, because they fell for all the bluster and self-importance of their brand. But each of us follows dozens, if not thousands of self-created brands. I’m not even paying for most of the creatives that I like. Are you?

The best way to approach creation online, then, is with an air of detachment, making things and contributing to conversations purely for the joy of it (again, see tip#1!!! Are you having fun??), not with any expectation of an outcome. Then, if a positive outcome does ever happen, it will be a pleasant surprise rather than an obligation you have to keep going.

Image is of a young brown-skinned man, looking downward then looking up to the camera with ominous, red-glowing eyes from the “I want to be unemployed, but I want money” meme. The text has been replaced with: “I want to practice detachment, but I want.”

Remember Your Followers Are Not Your Friends

Social media rewards parasociality, the artificial sense of a close relationship between a creator and their audience that gets fed when a creator shares intimate details about their personal life and encourages fans to form an emotional attachment to them.

Far too often, parasociality is spoken about as if it is a sin committed by the audience: they projected onto their idol far too hard and formed a fake emotional link based on desperation and delusion. How pathetic, right?

But creators encourage parasocial bonds with their audiences by doing things like saying that they love their followers, giving their fans a collective name, revealing intimate details about their lives, making promises to their audiences about the type of person they will be and the kinds of content they will deliver, sharing images of their partners, pets, and children, treating fan disappointment as if it’s tension in a genuine relationship, presenting themselves as a symbol of a larger group or struggle, and claiming their personal pages are a meaningful community.

These gestures of closeness and commitment can convince fans to invest more attention (and money) in an influencer. Getting a private look into another person’s life is seductive. Forming (the illusion of) a bond brings comfort to the lonesome and cast-aside. Influencers pick up on this enthusiasm, and mistake it for closeness themselves (or they just profit from it), and the boundaries between their brand and their actual self begin to fray. The might make themselves readily available to as many followers as they can in private messages, comments, and Discord channels, or use their followings for emotional support, until it’s unclear even to them who is truly their friend.

It doesn’t help that most new influencers typically start off with small, intimate-feeling followings and a desperation to grow their pages, so they adopt an intimate approach to posting that simply does not scale once you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people following you. Spamming your Instagram stories with photos of your romantic partner, half-nude selfies, and rants about your shitty boss plays just fine when you only have two thousand people following you, but if you keep blasting the same intimate details into the ether at a hundred thousand, you’re going to get fired, stalked, or broken up with.

What many influencers fail to understand is that a good portion of their social media followers are not in fact dedicated fans who want only the best for them, but bored rubberneckers who follow a litany of accounts with completely contradictory views, just to see who is going to launch an interesting new plotline next. Subreddits like r/Blogsnark make this all too apparent.

I’m not immune to it. I’ve sat in on livestream “accountability sessions” between two social justice influences that I followed and hated in equal measure, simply to see what would come of the mess. Some celebrities I follow less like an acolyte and more like a hunter. It simply is not safe to broadcast all of your unvarnished opinions and photos of the outside of your home  — not ever, but especially not when there’s more people watching you than you could ever know in a lifetime. It’s ridiculous that we’ve come to view this kind of behavior as normal.

If you’re posting a lot, you probably do have your favorite followers, and attention on the internet probably does help meet your social-emotional needs. But if you do not know a “fan” just as well as they know you, you cannot trust a thing they say. No matter how normalized it might be to share everything about yourself with an entire internet of strangers, parasociality emotionally manipulates the audience into an artificial social bond, and transforms the creator into an object of fantasy.

So make sure to be conscious of the multilayered dynamics of power and vulnerability that you are dabbling with, and make careful decisions about how you will keep yourself safe.

Maintain Your Own Boundaries

When I was first entering the Instagram influencer game, I ‘engaged’ with just about anyone. I answered questions, shared resources, chatted for hours about weighty emotional and political topics, and would fight with anybody in the comments about damn near anything (and usually, share screenshots of those ‘debates’ on my feed, fishing for praise). In the depths of pandemic lockdown I was frustrated and bored, and these interactions felt productive. It was educational. It was fighting bigotry. It was brand development.

I would come to hate nearly everyone that I interact with online, aside from my actual friends, and developed such a bad stress response that for years afterward I felt sick and attacked every time I got any notification on my phone.

At a certain scale, making yourself available to social media followers simply becomes impossible. Social scientific evidence suggests that human beings cannot maintain community relationships with more than a hundred and fifty people or so, and that we can’t really put more than 1500 faces to names.

A relationship is only possible when two individual people both know one another well, operate within the same social context, and both have the ability to affect each other’s lives. We can’t have this relationship to our followers — or with more than a handful of people. But what social media can create for us is the sensation of being ostracized by thousands of people with whom we don’t actually share a bond.

Our brains can’t tell the difference between an irate fan and the risk of social death. That’s why some of the most wealthy and successful influencers of all time respond to reasonable critique as if they are being martyred. Well, that and the massive, disgusting degree of self-involvement that being famous online pretty much requires.

You cannot expect your followers to respect how overwhelmed the job that you have chosen makes you. From their perspective, they remain individuals trying to connect and have a conversation with another person, whereas to you, the influencer, the audience has become a massive horde of threats and impossible-to-satisfy demands. The only solution is to maintain your own boundaries, placing firmer restrictions on the amount of feedback you take in and respond to.

A few years ago, I realized that I no longer had the time nor desire to read through every single comment a random person might leave on my social media posts. I didn’t want to engage. I didn’t want to moderate it all, or determine which messages had any merit. It seemed absurd to spend hours each day filling my head with the feedback of thousands of people, many of whom hadn’t even fully read the posts they were responding to.

Why should I give all of these strangers a free platform to share their messages? How the hell was I supposed to decide which questions to answer, which ones to ignore, which suicidal person in my inbox would get a reassuring word before I got so stressed I wanted to die myself? Truthfully, I didn’t want to hear any of it at all.

At that point, I decided to turn off all my social media comments and DMs, and I have never looked back.

Why I Turned Off Comments and DMs
My social media accounts have been on strict lockdown for the last few months. I’ve never known such peace.devonprice.medium.com

I’m a far less angry, reactive person now that I’m not flooded with the emotional projections and knee-jerk reactions of hundreds of thousands of strangers. I no longer see my ‘audience’ as a horde storming the battlements. I feel mostly in control of the time that I spend on social media, and adopt the post-and-ghost method: I share what I want, when I want to, then I log off immediately without looking at any metrics or feedback.

I know that I have chosen a blunter instrument than many other influencers have, but every time I see someone with a 200k follower account agonizing because a few random jerk-offs in their inbox told them playing fetch with their dog is animal abuse or demanding they explain why they were unmasked at the beach one time, I’m relieved at having made my choice.

If you’re struggling to maintain healthy boundaries with your audience or constantly feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, I strongly recommend turning off all notifications from people you do not follow, restricting who can comment or DM you, and reminding yourself that you have been making a choice to interact — and you can choose to stop.

If you’re having to spend hours each day even deciding which messages to respond to, you’re already taking in far, far too much social data. All that time you’re devoting to comment moderation and random chatting could be spent on creating something intentionally that would reach far more people.

Furthermore, as your number of followers grows, so will the amount of harassment and annoying nonsense you deal with, and you will not be able to behave with followers in the ways that you once did. I understand that this sucks, and it might go against the image you have of yourself as an approachable, sociable person who is doing all of this posting for the public good. It doesn’t matter. You’re a human being, not a free online course. And be honest with yourself: you are posting for you, so you might as well fucking enjoy it.

Do you want to be famous, or do you want to have friends?

Ask Yourself: Do I Want to Be Famous or Do I Just Want Friends?

A lot of us are hyper-online because we’re filled with a drive to connect that knows no other outlet. I understand this better than anyone. I spent essentially my entire twenties on Tumblr, posting through waves of eating disorder relapse and suicidal depression, when I wasn’t desperately Googling things like how to make friends? and is there any way I can make myself die with the power of my mind?

I had nobody, and no understanding of how to open up to people. The internet was my refuge. On Tumblr, I could be witty and express all that bothered me without ever being interrupted. Escaping the self that I hated so much was as simple as changing my username and avatar.

For as maladaptive and, frankly, sad as my posting back then could be, it also kinda worked. I got acquainted with lots of other young writers online, and we traded drafts and built friendships I still cherish fifteen years later. The eating disorder recovery and fat liberation blogs that I stumbled upon slowly taught me how to nourish myself. Some of the most pitiful laments that I posted drew a response from people who resonated with it, and when they used words like gender dysphoria and dissociation, I started to find my way out of despair.

It was because of the internet that I figured out I was trans, gay, kinky, and Autistic. No, actually, it was thanks to the people that I found in these spaces that I survived.

Many of us become hyperactive social media users because we want desperately to connect. In the depths of our isolation, we reach out in the only way that feels safe, and it works, because the world is filled with other human beings who are longing to be understood, too.

We are on the verge of building something that is beautiful. And then we are convinced by social media companies that actually it is our posts that are special, not our connections; We learn that our goal is not to connect with others, but to build our followings, to make something profitable and impressive from that desperate longing that almost set us free.

It is so easy to lose the plot. We started out searching for the feeling of being beloved, of being appreciated, but at some point became convinced that having an audience would satisfy that. We wanted a safe place to be vulnerable. Now we stand before the void and expose all the details of our hospitalization in exchange for a few subscriptions.

Sometimes, I see confessional social media posts that make me cringe with self-recognition. A polyamory influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers shares that being chronically unsatisfied in her marriage is really good for her, actually, and that it says something universal about anxious attachment. A zine-maker goes on a livestream and gossips about a competitor she once loved. A writer justifies her relapse and passes it off as wisdom. Use the name of my dead dog at checkout for a 15% discount!

I don’t know dude, I feel like this one should have stayed in your diary.

I have done things like this more times than I can count, and I’m regretful at ever having done it. Treating my social media presence like it was a private conversation with a best friend has damaged several of my closest relationships irreparably. Instead of mining the tensions in my family and the end of a ten-year relationship for content when it was fresh, I should have just sat down and cried. It was being heard and supported that I needed. None of this raw, desperate personal shit was remotely ready to be broadcasted where it can never be deleted or forgotten.

I have not escaped my compulsion toward digital confession, but I do feel the tides changing. The younger generation of social media users seem to get more skeeved out by oversharing, and many of the creators that I used to parasocially cathect onto, like the McElroys, have long stopped claiming to be holding their followers’ hands. We’ve all grown suspicious of algorithms and AI, the artifice of faux-casual “photo dumps.”

So I think this is a question that a lot of influencers are finally ready to hear: Do you even want to be doing all this? Or do you just think that you have to? Has all this posting really helped you? Has it been worth what you’ve traded in privacy and peace? Did you ever really want the thousands of followers? Or did you just want a few real good friends?

If so, it’s not too late to find them. We can get off all of our stages and find one another in the crowd. Nobody is asking for this performance. We can stop.