It's impossible to see what's genuinely impressive on social media until personal brand activity is decoupled from vanity.

When it comes to leadership brand building, surface-level metrics like follower count might seem impressive and enticing but higher engagement rates indicate that your content is aligned and landing with your audience, prompting them to take action. Measurement includes likes, comments, or clicks because they are the metrics marketers focus on to gauge performance, but what about DMs?

As an introvert who operates in confidential spaces, my social media engagement is on-brand, with most of it happening in the DMs. This is also the case for a lot of our Brandable & Co. senior leadership clients. Direct messages are private and they can be notoriously difficult for marketing teams to access on user-managed personal accounts; therefore they often get overlooked when it comes to measuring leadership brand impact, influence and equity.

In the words of Aristotle: "A friend to all is a friend to none" and depending on your profession, industry and offering, reaching a large audience may not be as important as reaching the right audience. The ultimate goal for most senior leaders is to develop and deepen meaningful, high-quality human relationships.

We live in a working world that judges books by their covers and people by their social media following when social media is simply a tool. LinkedIn is a powerful channel but it didn't exist pre-2002 and when the next big thing emerges, there may become a time where it doesn't exist again in the future.

Leadership influence is far greater than social media activity and a professional brand is the organising idea for every activity you participate in but I see this getting diluted daily in all that 'personal branding' advice that floats around on social media like ocean plastic!

In my opinion, the genuinely impressive people on social media are the ones who have been able to build meaningful human relationships through it. And when it comes to human relationships, depth is what pays dividends, especially when it relates to the commercial world we work in.

Author: Sallee Poinsette-Nash, one of the UK's leading people-brand strategists and founder of Brandable & Co. an award-winning people-brand consultancy specialising in personal brand strategy that closes the gap between professional brands and commercial success. Sallee is also the founder of Speakable & Co. where human expertise and AI technology come together to support people, companies, conferences and global events with public speaking.