My Accidental Journey as a Content Creator

Trials and tribulations across 3 social media platforms

Prologue

My birth year gifted me a disposable camera-high school and a Facebook-free college. I’m the quintessential older Millennial. In the early days of social media—Tumblr, Facebook, MySpace, Vine—the idea of sharing what I was doing, or knowing what anyone else was doing, held zero allure.

Then came Pinterest.

Pinterest and I decorated our first apartment together (the chevron rug was a mistake) and planned our wedding together (the purple and green scheme was not). Instagram was born in 2010 and I opted out with ease. In 2013, things shifted. I became a brand marketer at Coca-Cola and it was my job to be on the cusp of the “next” thing. What seemed like the next thing? Influencers.

I remember authoring a recommendation that my brand should pursue a partnership with 17-year-old YouTube phenomenon, Bethany Mota (9 years later Mota was famous enough to be on Dancing with the Stars). By 2014, I was managing a brand account with significant spend on FB/IG, writing strategies for influencer campaigns, and overseeing photoshoots for organic brand content. I reluctantly started spending out-of-office time on FB/IG/Twitter– the professional expectation was that I understood these platforms. And, I did.

Chapter 1: The TikTok Era

Fast-forward to when I received an offer to join Emory as marketing professor. My first task: launch a new class called Content Marketing. I knew from the outset that I would find a unique way to teach storytelling in the digital age. It took a few tries but in 2022, I struck gold, launching an experiment called “Go Viral, Get an A”. My students applied the science of sticky ideas to document their college experiences via TikTok videos.

30 days, 30 groups: Can we go viral?

Each day at 1pm we’d post a new piece of content to our class TikTok account and together 130 of us would juice the algorithm by releasing a torrential flood of likes / comments / re-shares from our personal accounts. Doing this within minutes of posting signaled to the algorithm: GO! This content is good! Push it out.

Within 30 days, we garnered 10M impressions. 1M points of engagement. 14K followers to @profmarinacooley, our class account. The NYTimes reached out to interview me. A journalist even came to our classroom and wrote about this unique way of teaching.

It was my 15 minutes of fame. The question at hand: what was I going to do with it?

In our Attention Economy, having an audience is the most powerful asset and here I was with 14K followers, garnered by my students for their takes on college. I was not the face of the account, but maybe I could become it and convert the audience to care about the topics important to me, namely work/life balance.

I spent all of 2023 swirling on how to leverage this TikTok audience. The professional goals I wanted to meet were:

1. Keep my job. I was a newbie professor, experimenting and getting media coverage was terrific for helping me stay employed. The coverage from my experiment was the first time I’d felt any degree of job security since I had started at the business school.

2. Thought leadership. I bring a unique perspective on work/life balance because unlike most academics or journalists, I worked 15 years in Corporate America. I know intimately how difficult it is to be a working parent and I want to use my voice to make it better for the next generation.

3. Make more money. I’d taken a significant pay cut to go from corporate to academia. With an audience and expertise, I hoped to get consulting opportunities and speaking engagements.

Once I clearly identified these goals I quit TikTok and the 14K followers.

Why???

I had no passion for TikTok. It wasn’t a community building platform. My For You page was flooded with TikTok Shop content which I abhorred. TikTok made my brain feel overloaded in the same way my body felt after eating French Toast. It seemed like a great idea until I actually had to deal with the aftermath of digesting 80g of sugar and a stick of butter. That was my brain on TikTok.

TikTok was a dead end but it gave me my first taste of creating videos, of being ridiculous, of putting myself out there, and ideating and editing content.

Chapter 2: The LinkedIn Era

I needed a different platform.

Now that I had my professional goals, LinkedIn seemed the obvious choice. Help me keep my job? Check. Provide a platform for thought leadership? Check. Make more money? I hoped. I liked that the platform was based on ideas and that success was based on one’s ability to articulate those ideas via writing.

In January of 2024, I entered LinkedIn Land. It was the Wild Wild West. The decline of Twitter meant that thousands of pontificators needed a new home and LinkedIn provided one. It wasn’t just work updates anymore—people were sharing everything from personal development aphorisms to their views on abortion.

I had an advantage when I entered. I study the science of sticky ideas for a living. I research platforms. I’m a good—no, great—observer of algorithms. I was motivated to experiment because I knew that everything I learned about LinkedIn and personal branding would fuel future lectures in my Content Marketing class.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared. Those first few weeks, I was nauseous as I proof-read each post. Over and over. Unlike funny TikTok videos, when you are writing there is nowhere to hide. At first, I talked about brand marketing and social media. Then, in a moment of bravery, I wrote about the challenges of being a working parent. My thoughts on the topic had developed immensely after years of research and primary interviews about work/life balance. I’d even launched a course on the topic.

I knew I struck a nerve when my first parenting post went viral. Then another.

I posted 5X a week for 90 days. I responded to every single comment and agreed to countless coffee chats. I did what the LinkedIn experts said and participated in “Golden Hour”. The deal was that from 8am-9am, all the LinkedIn creators would post. Then, they would spend the next hour leaving comments on each other’s posts. The more people that commented on your post in the first hour, the more it juiced the algorithm. The more engagement, the quicker the follower count grew.

Here’s the thing: for me, all these tactics worked. I grew my following to 5K in 90 days. My baby account outpunched its weight and hit 1M impressions. People started to understand my value system and see me as a thought leader on the Future of Work.

There was aftermath. My feed became a mix of people selling me consulting to grow my following and angry working mothers. I resented Golden Hour. My brain’s time to shine happens to be 8am and now I was handcuffed to this platform, five days a week, disseminating a flurry of comments as fast as my fingers could type. I’d read “experts” hot takes and watch them go viral, and I’d consequently turn into a green envy monster. I refreshed my engagement metrics every hour.

Ironically, my professional goals were all being met: The school valued the connections I made with alums, I was engaged in thought leadership and consulting opportunities were plentiful. But I had become a neurotic, unbalanced human. Despite the momentum, I logged off LinkedIn in June with the intent of taking a short break.

A few weeks off turned into five months.

When I logged back, I did so because I missed seeing my students’ updates. I missed sharing what I was doing in the classroom. I missed learning from alums and my own network! I’ve been back on LinkedIn for almost two months; there’s no daily posting, no commenting, no chasing virality.

Here’s the thing though, I still continue to believe that LinkedIn can help me meet my professional goals of keeping my job, presenting me as a thought leader and leading to money. I’ll have this in Part 3 of this series.

Chapter 3: The Instagram Era

I have been obsessed with Denmark for over a decade. In summer of ‘24, as part of my “Happiness Blueprint” course, a group of 25 students and I were heading on a research trip to examine how the happiest country in the world approached work/life balance.

I wanted to document everything and show American knowledge workers there was a different way to approach work, one that included boundaries, more play and a unique management style. I needed a visual platform and, given my break-up with TikTok, Instagram was the obvious choice. As a content marketing professor, I totally geeked out about storyboarding the content for the trip. I started a brand new IG account (@profmarinacooley) and shared stories from Denmark, grewing my following from 0 to a whopping 257. It didn’t matter, I had a blast!

Not only did I enjoy making IG reels but Denmark truly did change me. I’ll save this for another post but I came back absolutely committed to hobbies.

Hobbies are my biggest insurance policy for living a balanced life.

I wanted to share that philosophy with others and decided to start an IG series called “Get a Hobby”. My goal was to stop asking people what they did for work and instead ask them what they do for a hobby: learning who they were as Whole Humans, stepping into their hobbies and seeing why they loved it. With two Gen-Z students by my side, we documented 14 hobbies in 2024. We hit a chord. Our first video went viral and grew the account from 257 to 5K. A few videos later we went viral again and with momentum on our side my account grew to 14K followers.

But Spring semester hit hard. I paused on the hobbies and have been sharing content related to work/life balance, which is resonating (I hit 30K followers last week!). My favorite thing about Instagram is Stories. I get to engage with a real-deal community and reflect on my own days. Say what you will about social media, but I am making genuine connections. The people I have met on IG make me more thoughtful, more accountable and happier.

Together we are on a journey to be Whole Humans.

Chapter 4: What now?

TikTok taught me to ideate and edit video content. LinkedIn trained me to be comfortable with being vulnerable and Instagram provided me with the virtual community I’ve always craved. In every “era” I have honed my messaging to develop what is my personal brand and I’ll cover that in Part 2 of this series.

Now, I’m on Substack fulfilling my ultimate dream of writing in long-form.

I have big goals.

To put them into context, I wanted to show you all the trial & tribulations it’s taken to get here. Next week, I’ll share Part 2: how I evolved my personal brand (and how you can build yours). In Part 3, I’ll get into my professional ambitions on LinkedIn, IG and Substack.

I’ll wrap by saying, never in a million years did I think that as a woman in my early 40s, I’d be moonlighting as a content creator. Ultimately, my desire to be a positive role model, a Whole Human, and to help you be one too, is what pushes me to show up publicly.

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Thank you for being a reader!

I launched Prof Off Duty on March 5. I will be pouring my heart and talent into creating a community for Whole Humans. This means I’ll be foregoing paid consulting work, a financial risk, but one I’m willing to take to fulfill my dream of writing.

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