Beyond Social

The Accidental LinkedIn Influencer: How Jack Pietras Built his Brand on LinkedIn

• Vista Social • Episode 33

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What if growing your personal brand on LinkedIn didn’t have to feel like a daunting marathon but instead like a strategic sprint?

In this inspiring episode of Beyond Social, hosts Reggie Azevedo and Vitaly Veksler sit down with Jack Pietras, an organic social media marketing expert who skyrocketed his LinkedIn following from 0 to 7,700 in just six months — without any intention of going viral. Jack pulls back the curtain on the strategies that worked, like his $2 rule (leave your 2 cents on 100 posts a week), and why engagement, not perfection, is the ultimate key to building a community that lasts.

From hitting 70 million organic impressions on X (formerly Twitter) to landing unexpected brand deals, Jack’s story is a masterclass in the power of consistency, authenticity, and embracing unpolished content. Whether you’re a marketer, entrepreneur, or just someone looking to amplify your voice online, this episode will give you the practical tips and confidence to just hit "Post."

Could the secret to building a game-changing personal brand lie in doing less but connecting more? Tune in to find out.



Engage. Engage. Don't just put out, don't work all day on this incredible content and then not engage with the people that took the time to reply to it. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Beyond Social Podcast. I'm Reggie. This is the show where we go behind the scenes on how marketers are doing amazing things on social and how we're building tools to help support them. Today, we've got an awesome guest. Jack Pietras is here with us. Welcome, Jack. Thank you for stopping by. Thanks for having me. This is sweet. Absolutely. So for those of you who may not know Jack, he has been building, let's maybe not say intentionally, you've built a personal brand on LinkedIn. He's at 7700 followers within a short amount of time, almost six months, right? To get there. Around that. And I'm excited to dissect and dive into your success story. And maybe out of this people who are listening or watching us can finally understand that you don't need to overthink your way out of building your personal brand. You just got to do it. Oh yeah. Overthinking is your biggest enemy. So let's go back. Like how did this start? Yeah. So back last year, the end of last year, I was running an agency with my brother in law, and we were just trying to get more clients. We were in that growth state. And I just started posting on LinkedIn the results that I was getting with previous clients. And I just started gaining followers from that. People were in awe. They're like, "How are you doing this?" And the followers just started growing. And I was like, "Okay." I took a break from posting for a little bit, cause we got so many clients off the bat and we were working on them. I just took a break from LinkedIn and then we hung up. The agency took a break from it. We both got really busy, full time jobs, all that. We didn't want to obviously waste any client's time because our time was other places. So we hung up the agency and just took a slight break and then I just started posting again. Just throwbacks to results I was getting because I was thinking maybe, you know, I can get some personal brands on, some personal clients on the side. And so I just started posting and then I took a break from that and just started posting like basic social media tips, tricks, and all this and just kind of stuff that I did, and one day I woke up and a post went viral, and might've been a little controversial, but it went viral and the followers started going, soon I had a thousand. And then 2000, 5000, and here we are at 7700, just six months later. Wasn't intentional, but hey, I'll take it. So did the controversy help, or do you think it would've happened naturally as well? I don't know if it, I know it helped get the exposure. I don't, I think there are some people that were agreeing with me, but it just started some arguments in the chat, whether or not, It was over X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. I'm very good at that platform because I was very good at Twitter. I really knew how to work the algorithm. And then Elon bought X and the same tactics apply, there's new features, all this stuff, but it's still the same, bread and butter. And I just started posting results that I was getting and one post, I think it was, I don't know the numbers exact, but it was just a screenshot of my analytics for a week that I got for a client. And this client was a very small Christian based organization, like very niched and they just wanted to get their donors up and wanted exposure. So I just started posting content for them on X and 70 million impressions in seven, seven days. Wow. No ads. And no ads, all organic. I'm only organic. I don't do any paid. Organic is my specialty, but I posted those analytics and people started just blowing up in the comments saying, some people were saying, "Yes, X is alive," some people were saying "X is dead," and it just started this, and then, I don't know if people followed me for future confrontation, if they were, they thought I was going to post more content down the road that would spark this, but, and another thing that, once that post went viral, I had a lot of people DMing me and asking me, "How can I get a viral post? How can I do this?" And honestly, the best way I tell them is don't focus on virality because yes, it helps, but the thing about it is when you don't have a lot of followers, let's say you have 50 LinkedIn followers or less, the odds of your content going viral on somewhere like LinkedIn is very low. What would you say is the threshold when you can begin to expect it? I would say between 500 to 1000, your chances go up, but if you're very low, and a lot of people that message me, they're below 100, and they're so focused on their content, which is great, making it all they have incredible content. I'll read through it and I'm like, "Wow, this should be going viral." My random LinkedIn thought should not be going viral. you deserve it more than I do. And one of the things I tell them, and I started doing this very seriously and I don't remember where I got it from, but I pretty much live by it on social and it's, the $2 rule. You leave your 2 cents on a hundred other people's posts a week. That's 20 comments a day. And I'm not talking, go into someone's comment section and use the AI generated LinkedIn. I cannot stand that. Don't use it. People can tell. I'm sure I'm talking three sentences. Your thoughts. Genuine. 20 a day. And if you do that 20 a day, five days a week, that's your 2 cents. That's the $2 rule. If you do that consistently on top of posting your high quality content. And I was posting once a day. Now I'm I just post when I want. I don't really have a schedule. I try to do once a day. Sometimes it's every other, keep putting out like your high quality content. You also have to go out there and network because people aren't just going to come to you. It just, it doubles your chances of growing 10 times as fast if you just network and outreach while posting quality content. It's not a megaphone, right? this is LinkedIn is built as the network for connecting. It's supposed to be about finding jobs back in the day, right? So it is about connecting people with people as with other social networks, but I feel like even more with LinkedIn, if you don't do the community engagement, which I guess is what a lot of people call it, like it's, can you expect to get results realistically? No, community is like the most important thing you can have. And, I see a lot of big creators on LinkedIn or honestly any platform they post and it just, within five minutes, it's flooded with just like those AI generated comments. Everyone wants to be that top one. I get that. But another thing is like when I can't stand when I don't see creators like replying to their community or like they're taking the time to comment on your stuff, give them the time back. Obviously if it's like a, they just put a thumbs up emoji. I'm not going to reply to that. I know why you're here, but like you got to engage, reply to your DMS. You can't just post and shut the app off. I honestly, I don't do LinkedIn full time, obviously, I do a full time job. So I try to spend at least 30 minutes a day on LinkedIn and the first 10 minutes is just coming up with a post, brainstorming. I get that post out. The other 20 minutes is going to my post from the previous day, replying to everyone, and then doing that, two cents rule on 20 posts. That's it's all it takes is 30 minutes to just do that many genuine connections. And I feel like people think it takes, 40 hours a week to get a personal brand like this. And no, I'm not a massive personal brand, but, it grew fast from this tactic that I used and I recommend it to everyone. It's literally 30 minutes a day. You could do more. You could do 40 people a day. You could comment on their stuff, but I think that's the quickest way. And that's how I got, some other big creators that I would never have imagined six months ago would comment on my content, but they see me day in and day out commenting on their stuff with genuine interaction and they pay it back. And when they comment on your stuff, it shows up on their followers feed. So you have that higher chance of going viral, but don't just, post out your incredible content. And wait. And wait. I don't want to say it's a waste, but like you gotta, there's a whole other end to it. You have to be out there in other people's pages. Almost sounds like a, one of those five minute abs mandates, right? So if all you, if you spend five minutes a day on your abs, you can have the abs, right? So if you can spend 30 minutes a day on your LinkedIn, your LinkedIn will grow. So the recipe seems to be very straightforward. Wholesome content. Honest, genuine, not necessarily crazy good, just something about what you do, spend time commenting, try to get to that magic 500 to 1000 threshold followers, and then all sorts of good things can happen. Can you talk about what it means, I guess we talk about viral, what does that mean? How many in relationship to say somebody having 500 to 1000 followers? What does virality mean? How do they know that they hit it? Is it, I don't know, 10000 views or so many likes, how do you know that it's viral? Honestly, I guess it depends on the person and the size of their account. If someone with, 100,000 LinkedIn followers gets 500,000 views on their post, or it's if they're hitting that daily, that's not viral for them, but for a smaller account, that's viral. But in your case, for example, you said you posted something about X and it went viral. That one. Just to put things into perspective, how many followers did you have at that point, approximately? When I posted that one about X, I was at, I want to say 900 followers. Okay. And it hit 1.5 million views. Wow. Dang. And I think that took me to obviously it's a, it's, that's a massive, honestly, it's still getting views, I'm sure. And I don't know how many followers I gained from that. I haven't looked at the analytics from that post individually, in a while, but I think within the first week, that one gained me like a thousand followers alone. And that kind of just starts the snowball effect. And then the thing about it is you can get all these followers, but you got to keep them engaged. You can have, and we see it across all platforms, you can have, a few hundred thousand followers. They get five comments. That's not a community. Followers, in my opinion, are the most important metric. And a lot of people think it is, some brands that I've done work for, when I was in the agency or running the agency. They were like, we just want to hit 10,000 followers by this date. And I'm like, you shouldn't be focused on that because you could have 10,000 followers and no engagement, right? if no one's engaging with your content, what is the point, right? plenty of those brands. Engagement is so much more important than followers. And whenever people message me and they're like,"Hey, I want to get where you're at with followers." I'm like, "It's not about followers. How is your post performing? Do people read your message? Do people care about your message? Like enough to comment?" That's the important thing. Do not focus on followers. And I think that's the best message you can give someone is just you got to engage. You have to or else your community is just going to die out. I guess followers is one of the metrics. It doesn't hurt to pay attention to it, but it's probably the relationship between the followers and the engagement, that ratio, right? I guess in the cases, When you're running ads, does that even apply? Would you see a personal brand trying to run some ads with their own content to try to go viral? I wonder, or at least get to that magic threshold of Yeah, try to get to that magic threshold of that thousand followers and whatnot, maybe? I've definitely seen it, more so on Instagram than LinkedIn though. Yeah. I see people, they'll, sell a course or, their ad is "Give me your email and I'll send you this free PDF on how to grow your socials to a million followers in one month." Like it's just unrealistic, but they must be working if people are still running them. Meta's happy. Oh my gosh. But yeah, no, I don't recommend that because most, again, if you're with the ad, If you're going to run an ad to grow your personal brand, you have to offer something in order for them to follow. Like your ad can't just be like,"Hey, I'm Jack and I post this." But if you just boost the post. Oh, you could do that for sure. Yeah, like the boosting. Because basically what I'm trying to say is that, like you said, a lot of people that are reaching out, they have less than a hundred followers, right? And chances are going from like 50 to a thousand is probably very difficult, versus subsequently getting from a thousand, like you said, all of a sudden in one day you can get another thousand and the snowball and all of that, right? I wonder if we can, if not recommend, then at least suggest the possibility of taking that shortcut, essentially trying to get from, say, 20, 30, 50 followers to at least 500 and maybe pay a little bit for that privilege? Yeah, here's, the way I look at that is, you could boost a post and you could get to those 500 followers, but what are the odds that those 500 followers are genuine and going to engage with you. The thing about going from the 50 followers to that 500 benchmark is, you are interacting with those people on the way, and then once you get to the 500, you have this strong community behind you that can push you to the 1,000, and then that strong community can push you to the 2,000, and it's just a snowball effect where if you're just, if you, and honestly, if I don't know, I've never boosted a LinkedIn post in my life, does it say it's boosted? Does it say promoted or anything? Probably does. It does. It most likely does, yeah. I don't know if that would turn people off, if they saw okay, this guy's trying to, they, they like people that are authentic and things that are done, I think organic is so much more powerful than paid. If you're growing a brand, like a personal brand, if you're selling a product, obviously. Paid is better, but I would, recommend just doing it the organic way and it's going to take extra time, but it just pays off in the long run. It really does because you just, you get relationships going and the people that I had, that I was talking to at, when I had 50 followers, I'm still talking to and very close with. And they comment on my stuff regularly, and repost it and stuff, and it's like... The inner circle. You don't want to lose those people. Yeah. And if you do it quick, and just try to find those shortcuts, you will lose them. There's a certain discipline that you miss out on as well. Absolutely. By using that shortcut. You don't develop that muscle memory, that discipline of doing 20 a day, and everything like that, which, you can very easily see that result from the Boosted Post, and be like, "Yeah, I don't need to do community engagement, it's all good." And as soon as the money stops trickling over to Microsoft for the boosted posts, the results just, you know, it doesn't just it doesn't just apply to personal brands, but then people that are watching this, that run other social medias for any brand, if it's a company, engage, engage, don't just put out, don't work all day on this incredible content and then not engage with the people that took the time to reply to it. Let's talk about the why, right? So you build a personal brand, you've got a lot of followers. what's the benefit here? Let's dive into that. I wasn't in it for the benefits until, I didn't even know there were benefits to be honest. I just didn't know the power of a personal brand. I've been doing social media for 8 years now. 4 years professional and then 4 years before that, I was just doing it for fun. I didn't even show my face, I would grow these, I'd pick a theme, you wanna do travel, you wanna do finance, memes, it doesn't matter. Just repurpose other people's content, give them credit. You grow these brands. And then back when, dropshipping was big and e commerce or e commerce is still big, but specifically dropshipping and stuff, sell products with these brands and all that. so yeah, I've been in it for a while and I didn't, I never planned on showing my face. And I technically still don't show my face other than the profile picture. And people tell me, "I want to, grow like you did, but I don't want to do the podcast and I don't want to film myself." And I DM them. And I said, "You have a profile picture showing yourself. That's all I did." I don't, this is my first podcast appearance ever. We'll make you famous. I just, hey, this is my first. Thousand followers guaranteed once this goes live. Hey, that'd be sweet. I just started a newsletter, like that's, and I post on that maybe once a week, depending. But I've, never shown my face. And I think that gives them a lot of courage. But to answer your question, I didn't have any plans of doing this, it just happened and now I'm really, seeing the benefits. Here's the thing. I look at LinkedIn as like a resume, but not a resume, a billboard, I should say that. So you got, I like to use this analogy, you have your one page resume with all your accomplishments. That's one of those like billboards that are printed out, they don't change, where your LinkedIn is like one of those electric ones that are always shifting through different ads. And like the job I have now did not apply for it. They have never seen my resume. They just saw one of my LinkedIn posts, the results I got. DM me and I had the job like the next day. And that's what I preach to people is it's so powerful. And even if you're not in it for the personal brand sake, just post about what you're doing. And on top of it, you got to pick your niche. That's the biggest thing. And when I first started, I had, I got my real estate license before I did even graduate college. And my content was real estate. And for the first few months, and I looked at my analytics and my, my audience was like, 90 percent real estate agents and then 10 percent marketing and social media mixed in there. And I was like, "You know what, real estate doesn't interest me as much." And there's not really that much content post about real estate, and on top of that, you're always selling something as a real estate agent. You're just trying to get clients and all this stuff. And I was like, I'm just going to focus up my niche, stop with real estate and just focus on social media. And then the social media grew and now I'm doing, cause the job that I work right now, I'm not a social media manager. I'm the organic marketing manager. So I oversee all marketing. I manage a social media team now. I'm not really hands in on social media as much, which wasn't really my plan, but it happened. And I don't mind it, but, I just lost my train of thought. That's all good. The results. The fact that you've got this job through the results. If anybody's thinking through "Hey, what should I, why should I do this?" Cause we talk about, we've had some interviews and we've talked about as we built, advocacy, it's it's great for the brand if their employees are personal brand enthusiasts and they do this because it'll drive results for the company. But at the same time, we keep hearing this trend from you, Chad, Morgan. It's you can create opportunities for yourself. Brand deals. I want to hear about the dude wipe situation there too, cause that was pretty cool. But there's just so much. Yes, replacing social LinkedIn profile that replaces your resume and you are being judged based on the state of your current resume. May not apply to all jobs, maybe in the same way, but I think we live in such a digitized world where I bet that the marketer being relevant on social or irrelevant on social will be a fairly meaningful distinction, right? Can you really hire somebody who has a non existent presence? It's almost I don't know, can you hire a personal trainer that does not look fit? I don't know. Can you hire a, I don't know, a finance advisor that drives a beat up car? You know what I mean? this has to be some correlation between, right, the job that you're applying as in this case, the social presence. And I'm sure that you get, let's say if your goal is to get job offers, right? That's great. But I'm like, you can, you're probably getting offers to manage people, social, business offers, right? I don't know. Endorsements. I'm sure you get a crazy number of variety of different opportunities, right? So yeah, so this is a new resume, right? That everybody must have, I feel. Absolutely. Yeah. And if you want to get into your, the brand deal. The brand, yeah, let's talk about that. I didn't think you could even get brand deals with a personal brand. I always thought it was for other people, I just, I start, my goal was to get clients. And then I had, when I got a platform, I had people commenting. And stuff going viral and then brands would pop up out of nowhere. I didn't necessarily know the brand, they were smaller, but they would just, message and say,"Hey, do you want to promote us in one of your posts?" I'm not going to mention any names because I'm still in negotiations with most of them. But the big one was, I had a post go viral, I don't know, a few weeks ago, and Dude Wipes commented on it. And there were other brands that messaged me, assuming I was working with Dude Wipes, so they wanted to get featured as well. So I don't, obviously I didn't tell them that I'm not working with DudeWipes, but now they're gonna hear it, but hey. Not for a few months, go live, note to the editor, after the contract signs, we'll go live with this episode. But, yeah, no, so it's really, really cool that, cause my, again, my plan was not to make money off of this. It was, to give myself a platform to get new opportunities and such. But now there's like a whole nother stream of income that comes from it and in a short amount of time. And I'm not, I don't want everyone that's watching this to think that, it's going to be six months for everyone. Sure. Sure. I don't want to, I don't want to put that unrealistic narrative out there, but I can promise that, if you truly put the effort in and engage and want it, and actually be authentic with your community. You know don't look at what someone else is doing and copy it. Don't copy their style, you just gotta be yourself. Authentic. It is a personal brand at the end of the day. Personal. The word is in there, it's not, it's different for everyone. Some people's got their podcasts. Some people have their, just their newsletters. I just post on LinkedIn. That's it. And brands dig that. They dig when there's a community and a personality around the community. So that's the biggest message I can give people. So if someone is listening or watching us and they're like, "Listen, I can't even figure out what to post about. I'm in mortgage, I'm in insurance." What do you suggest? What would you tell them is like finding ideas, inspiration for just putting those 30 minutes in every day or 10 minutes I'm going to create some content for myself. Not looking too hard maybe? Maybe not overthinking this? That's the biggest thing is just post. I post about that a lot. A lot of my posts are just like, stop overthinking it, just hit the post button, you'll be surprised if it does bad, you'll learn from it, but you'll never learn if you don't just post it, you'll never know what it could have done. So yeah, just, you have to be authentic, and when it comes to the creativity side of it, if you're not, if you're one of those people that just post, and then turn, close the app, There's no, you're not going to find other forms of content where if you're, if you do that $2 rule that I spoke of and you're commenting on a hundred posts a week, it's going to just start sparking more creativity in your mind because you're taking in more content and it just helps. It overall helps and you'll be thinking of content and then you'll be like, "Oh, I saw a post like this the other day," and I'm not saying don't copy it word for word, but get inspiration from it, take that topic they post about and elaborate on it. And another thing is, you don't have to post a Bible verse. It doesn't have to be three scrolls. Just, it can be, I like to post a few forms of each content every week. There's, I'll do like Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It's like a two liner, Tuesday's a long form and then Thursday somewhere in the middle. So just vary and try everything. Don't let your creativity be dampened by anything, just post and be yourself. That's the biggest thing. Don't look at what someone else is doing and copy their voice because you have your own voice. So you just have to, you just have to use it. Don't overthink it. 30 minutes a day, all sounds like an awesome title for the podcast. I'm gonna throw another one in there, this could end up being the title of the podcast. The phrase has been getting thrown around a lot, and this is gonna be a little bit different than what we've been talking about. That X is dead? Can we maybe wrap up on that concept? Do you think X is dead? No. X is so... I will say this. For organic, X is thriving. For paid, I don't recommend it. They, the problem is, it's pricier than other platforms, but you're also more prone to getting you pay by the impression, and a lot of those can be bots. There's a lot of bots on the platform. That's the only problem. So if you're using paid ads, you can bite through your budget very quick and it might not even add up. But I don't know how anyone can say it's dead. I look at, getting 70 million organic views in a week. Like how is that dead? Yeah, no, but I guess back to the personal profile branding, no. Would you say you have to pick a spot for yourself? Make it or should somebody, it's gonna be would it be more difficult to be on X and LinkedIn for somebody getting started? Is it just better to stick on LinkedIn like professionals? I think it's good if you have the time to spread out and just try everything. I don't have a personal X and I don't have a personal, I have a personal Instagram, but it's private and has 500 followers. I don't use it. I don't have a Facebook. I just use LinkedIn, but I do have a, incognito account on X so I can just scroll. And I get my news from there and my updates, that's what it's for. but it's, I don't know how this works, but. People that I interact with on LinkedIn, I'm seeing their profile in X, which kind of creeps me out a little bit, but I see some like the top creators on LinkedIn are also on X and getting really good impressions. I forget his name off the top of my head, but I think he's got 80,000 on LinkedIn and 40,000 on X. That's combined 120,000 audience right there. And then when a brand deal comes to your door, you say,"Hey, I can promote you cross platform, not just LinkedIn." So I think it's definitely smart if you have the time to do so, but I definitely don't let, if you spread yourself out, don't let it take attention away from, it's hard to give your full on every platform. If you focus on one and really get that growing on like a snowball effect type thing where it's growing on its own organically, then maybe branch out. But if you have the time to dedicate your full self, maybe an hour a day combined to both and you just actually fully engage with both and go for it, but don't let it, take away from your main one. That's awesome to summarize. My takeaways here are a few posts a week, maybe 4 to 5, 30 minutes a day to both create the post as well as to engage, like 20 comments a day should probably be a good number, try to go past that 500 to 1000 threshold of followers. Stay true to yourself in terms of content and just whatever topic you've picked. And you should see the results. And if you feel like 30 minutes a day is not too taxing on yourself, then consider other networks, consider more experimenting. Yeah. And you can always, if you're seeing results from that, 30 minutes a day, then you have time to up it, maybe on some days more than others, if you're just laying down, relaxing, go on LinkedIn and you don't even have to post, just comment on people's stuff, shoot them a message, someone wants to connect with you, get to know them in the DMs and then get them to, and yeah, the biggest thing is just to be yourself, don't get lost and just keep pushing. That's the biggest thing. It's just consistency. If you don't have that consistency, then it's not going to happen. Awesome. Fantastic. Consistency. Absolutely. Thanks, Jack. Any final thoughts for our listeners or viewers? Guys, I would just say to yourself, post. Just post. Try everything. Don't get comfortable with one form of content, just try everything because you'll be surprised when something takes off and you weren't expecting it to. That's what happened to me. I had no intention of it going viral and it happened and it just goes on from there. So just, take the risk and just post it to yourself. You want to put yourself out there, put yourself out there. If you want to just be the guy behind the profile picture, like I am up until now, go for it. Start a podcast, start the newsletter, just be you. And look at that end up on a business social podcast. That's when you can be on. Thank you so much, Jack. I appreciate you for being here with us, making the trip down. Thank you guys for joining us. If you have a question, if you have a specific topic that you'd like us to see covered head over to vistasocial.com/podcast, and if maybe you want to join Vitaly and I here on the couch in the studio for an upcoming episode, that's where you can find us as well. Make sure you give us a like and comment, share, wherever you're consuming this content. And we'll see you next week.