Aniekan Akam
Web3 Social Media Manager |Content Strategist
New to Contra
Aniekan is building their profile!
Most brand pages don't fail. They get abandoned.
There is a specific kind of grief that brand page owners never acknowledge. It's the grief of a page you started with genuine energy left abandoned. Not because they didn’t have something real to say, they just didn’t say it long enough.
One of the real reasons most brand pages die isn't strategy; It's sequence.
People build the brand architecture first: the aesthetics, the tone guide, the content pillars and totally ignore the part where they build the behavior that makes all of it sustainable.
They want the complete house before they've formed the habit of laying bricks.
The first 90 days of a brand page aren't about growth metrics. Growth is a downstream result of something far less exciting: the discipline of showing up with little to no audience yet and no applause. We romanticize the blow-up.
That one Reel.
That one thread that adds 10k followers overnight.
But do you know what happens when brands with no muscle memory go viral: they crash. They can’t reply, then they post again a week later into the void, chasing an algo that’s moved on. The problem wasn’t the content. It was the expectation. People start brand pages looking for virality when they should be looking to build a habit.
What actually happens in the body of a brand during the first 90 days:
A business doesn't become profitable in 90 days. A body doesn't transform in 90 days. A skill doesn't sharpen in 90 days. Why then do we expect a brand: a living, breathing representation of trust between you and strangers to explode in 90 days?
What 90 days can do for your brand is buy you data on what resonates. The algorithm indexes you. It doesn't reward you yet. It's watching. It needs to see pattern recognition before it amplifies anything. You are, in those first 90 days, teaching a machine what you are. That requires repetition.
Your audience, small as it is, develops recognition. Recognition becomes familiarity. Familiarity becomes the reason someone tags a friend in your post six weeks from now. You develop a content reflex. The 90th post takes a fraction of the creative energy the first post cost you. Fluency compounds. Silence resets the counter.
Here’s a very hard fact:
Every brand you currently admire was, at some point, talking to an audience of eleven people who weren't paying close attention. The difference between that brand and the hundreds of pages you've never heard of is not talent, not luck, and not budget. It is the decision to keep showing up past the point where it felt pointless.
That decision, made repeatedly over 90 days, is the actual product. Everything else: the followers, the deals, the virality is just what consistency looks like from the outside.
This is exactly what I help brands navigate. The first 90 days are the hardest, not because the content is difficult, but because the discipline is. If you're building a brand page and need someone who understands the long game, not just the viral moment — that's the work I do.
So here’s my genuine question: Are you building a brand, or are you auditioning for attention?
1
6
The best social media manager you've ever followed probably has under 10k followers.
It’s truly concerning and it’s overlooked.
In the “Content Creation” space, we've spent the last five years (or more) rewarding performance over actual understanding. We clap for the person who posts three times a day, goes viral twice a month and has a fancy Notion template for every content format known to man. We call them experts, we pay them like experts, we share their threads.
But being loud isn't the same as being good. Loud is just… loud.
The people who actually get it, the people who genuinely understand why someone stops scrolling, why a comment section turns into a real conversation, those people are usually just quietly doing their thing. Studying people like it's a second job. They're not trying to look like experts. They're becoming them.
The funny thing is most brands are hiring the wrong people and not clocking it. (partly because the brands themselves are more interested in vanity metrics and hype for short term traction). They're hiring people who can talk about engagement instead of people who can actually create it. There's a huge difference between someone who knows what went viral last week and someone who understands the underlying feeling that made it spread.
Just think about it, your Iya Beji down the road who sells rice and stew. That woman has never run a single ad in her life. And yet every single customer that buys from her feels like they're her favorite person. She remembers you like your stew with less oil and when you're having a rough day, she says one small thing like "ah, take am easy" or "God go do am" and somehow, it lands exactly where you need it. Meanwhile the new provision store at the junction is blasting music at full volume, has a big fancy banner and is always "doing promo." But you walk out of there and feel… nothing. Just noise.
One of them truly understands people. The other just understands how to make enough noise.
That's the difference between real connection and just being loud. And on social media, just like on your street, people will ALWAYS come back to the one who made them feel something.
That's what good social media management actually is. It's not a megaphone. It's a mirror.
The market doesn't reward that kind of connection right away. Real connection takes time, builds slowly, compounds and doesn't make for a great case study. Virality is fast, easy to screenshot and easy to sell in a pitch deck. So brands keep chasing noise, agencies keep hiring performers, and the people who actually understand human behavior stay undervalued and overlooked or worse, they learn to be loud just to survive the industry.
We created this problem. The obsession with metrics, follower counts, and "impressions" trained an entire generation of social media managers to optimize for attention instead of connection. And now we're surprised that most brand pages feel empty. Those “most viral” moments leave no memory. People follow accounts for months and feel absolutely nothing.
Being loud is easy because it requires no self-awareness. You don't need to understand people, you just have to be seen by them. But being real is rare. Because it requires something most of us actively avoid — sitting still long enough to figure out what someone actually needs to hear.
The best social media managers aren't performing for you, they're thinking about you.
There's a difference. You feel it.
0
7
I ran content and community for a Web3 brand account. In under a month, using a completely organic strategy, engagement jumped 557%, 99.8% of our reach came from people who didn’t follow us, and we still landed 62K+ impressions — with zero paid promotions.
0
11