I'm part of the 3%

Some people may have heard me refer to how life was, when I started my business 20 years ago - and they gaze in wonder and how I managed to find and deliver any work at all, in an age before iPhones, Dropbox, and LinkedIn (we used sharpened stones to carve messages on stones, which we then threw in people's general direction).

But as I've been reflecting on my porcelain anniversary, I've realised that a lot of the social media that's embedded in our daily lives today was still 'growing up' when I first started to play with them.

Looking at the histories of platforms like LinkedIn, I've realised that I was in the first 3% of people who now use it to Link; and in the first 2.5% of people who started to regularly tweet.

Being part of this very early crowd of users meant that I experimented a lot with social media, because it felt safe to do so - they weren't that many other people in the spaces to laugh at me if I accidentally created what turned out to be a nsfw hashtag. And doing so got recognised as one of the top 500 most influential tweeters globally for a time in 2012; and LinkedIn celebrating me as having an 'all star'/can't possibly be any better, profile.

Social media also felt a lot more accepting in those days - the pace of posting was slower, and it felt that people were generally more accepting and understanding of each other's content. But I'm mainly taking my realising that I was amongst the early adopters of these now mainstream platforms as another sign of why it might be that my business has been able to last longer than 90% of all other startups: I'm curious to try out new things, and experiment/play with them. And other people were too - which led to some of them creating their own hashtags about me: #TwitterKingAdrian, #ChatToAdrian, and #SocEntSexGod.  

Social media has never helped me land any big client projects, or seen me go viral - but I didn't get into those spaces to do that. I'm in these spaces because this is where other people hang out, and ultimately I'm interested in other people. After all, it's the relationships we have that help determine our future successes, so why wouldn't I want to be showing interest and willingness to try out new things, if other people think they may be interesting too?

 

The sums behind my % claims =  

I was in first 33 million people to join LinkedIn (in 2008) - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-did-you-first-join-linkedin-heres-how-find-out-andy-brown-k9fpe/. In 2025, 1.1bn people have profiles on Linked In, which means I was in the first 3%.

I joined Twitter/X in 2009, when there were 15m active users (out of the 75m who created a profile but then never did anything). In 2025, there are 611m active X users, which means I was in the first 2.5%.