Long before I became a founder, I was already experimenting with social media, not because it was fashionable, not because someone told me personal branding would become important, and not because I had a grand strategy written neatly inside a notebook, but because I could sense that these platforms were quietly changing the way people discovered ideas, trusted experts, followed companies, and made decisions.
It started with Twitter, then Facebook came along, followed by YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and later TikTok and Threads, and with every new platform I joined, I found myself learning the same painful but useful lesson: every platform has its own behaviour, its own audience, its own rhythm, and its own strange way of rewarding or punishing your content.
There were no formal classes for me, no coach sitting beside me, no step-by-step manual that said, “Mazlan, this is exactly how you should build your voice online.” I learned the old-fashioned way by reading, testing, failing, adjusting, and trying again, which sounds noble now, but at that time, it was mostly trial and error with a lot of silent head-scratching in between.
When FAVORIOT started to grow, social media was no longer just a personal space where I shared thoughts, opinions, and reflections. It became part of the business itself, and suddenly I was not only speaking as Mazlan Abbas, the person, but also carrying the voice of FAVORIOT, the company, the brand, the team, and the mission we were trying to build.
That was when things became complicated.
I thought to myself, “So now I have to be myself, represent the company, educate the market, promote the product, build trust, and still sound human at the same time?”
Yes, apparently.
And I had to do all of that while running a startup.
When Social Media Starts Feeling Like a Battlefield
At one point, managing social media felt like being a soldier defending too many frontlines at the same time, because LinkedIn wanted professional insights, Facebook preferred a more personal tone, X rewarded sharp and quick comments, TikTok demanded visual storytelling, Threads wanted casual conversations, Instagram needed strong visuals, and YouTube required patience, planning, and a completely different level of commitment.
Every platform seemed to ask for something different, yet all of them demanded the same thing from me: time, attention, consistency, and energy.
The difficult part was not just posting. Anyone can post. The real challenge was knowing what to say, how to say it, where to say it, and which version of myself should be speaking.
For my personal account, people followed me because they wanted my thoughts, my stories, my experiences, and my reflections. They wanted to see the human side of the founder, not a walking advertisement. For the FAVORIOT account, the expectations were different because the company needed to sound clear, professional, relevant, and trustworthy to customers, partners, developers, investors, universities, and the wider IoT community.
That was where the first real problem appeared: mixed messaging.
The Fine Line Between Personal Voice and Company Voice
The line between a founder and the company can become blurry, especially in a startup where the founder’s face, voice, reputation, and personality are often tied closely to the brand, and while this can be powerful, it can also create confusion if we are not careful.
Whenever I posted too much business content on my personal account, engagement usually dropped because people did not follow me just to receive product updates. They followed me because they wanted perspective, stories, lessons, observations, and sometimes a little honesty about what it really feels like to build something from the ground up.
At the same time, if the company account became too personal, it risked weakening the professional image of the brand, because a company page must serve a different purpose. It must help customers understand what the company does, why it matters, how it solves problems, and why people should trust it.
This was not just a technical content issue. It was an identity issue.
Before pressing publish, I often had to ask myself, “Am I speaking as Mazlan, or am I speaking as FAVORIOT?”
That small question became very important, because personal branding and company branding may support each other, but they should not become the same thing. A personal account earns attention through authenticity, while a company account earns trust through clarity.
“Your personal account earns attention through authenticity. Your company account earns trust through clarity.”
It took me years to truly understand that, and even now, I still remind myself of it whenever I prepare content for different platforms.
The Hardest Battle Is Still Time
If anyone asks me what the biggest challenge is in managing social media as a founder, my answer is very simple: time.
Many people assume content creation means typing a few lines, adding a nice image, and clicking publish, but anyone who has done it seriously knows that one good post can involve research, choosing the right angle, writing the hook, shaping the message, checking the tone, preparing visuals, proofreading, deciding where to post, adjusting the format for each platform, and then monitoring the response after it goes live.
Now multiply that by several platforms.
Then multiply it again by two accounts, one personal and one company.
Then add meetings, proposals, customer follow-ups, speaking engagements, product discussions, investor conversations, staff matters, and the never-ending demands of running a startup.
That is when social media stops looking like a simple marketing activity and starts feeling like another full-time job quietly hiding inside your actual full-time job.
There were moments when I honestly felt like shutting everything down and focusing only on the “real work,” but each time that thought appeared, another thought answered it almost immediately.
“But this is part of the real work now.”
That is the reality for founders today, because social media is no longer optional if you want people to discover you, understand you, evaluate your credibility, and eventually trust you enough to have a serious conversation.
A startup can have a good product, a committed team, and a powerful vision, but if nobody sees it, hears about it, or understands it, the market may assume that nothing much is happening.
And that is dangerous.
Doing Everything Alone Can Drain You Quietly
For a long time, I handled most of the social media work by myself, which meant writing, editing, posting, choosing angles, creating variations, checking responses, replying to comments, and thinking about how to balance the personal voice with the company voice.
From the outside, people only see the final post, but they do not see the hesitation behind it, the drafts that never get published, the captions that are rewritten five times, the posts that are deleted because they do not feel right, or the late-night moment when you stare at the screen and wonder whether the message is useful or just noise.
Founders know this feeling very well.
We are not only building products. We are also building trust, visibility, confidence, and a story that the market can understand.
Many times, we do this with limited people, limited budget, limited time, and limited emotional energy, yet social media continues to demand freshness, consistency, and relevance as if we have a large content department hiding somewhere inside the company.
I thought to myself, “If people knew how much effort goes into one simple post, maybe they would forgive me for occasionally disappearing.”
But the market rarely forgives silence for too long.
If you disappear, people forget.
If you only appear when you want to sell, people resist.
If you post without direction, people get confused.
That is why founders need not only content, but also a system.
Then AI Changed the Way I Work
When AI tools like ChatGPT arrived, my content process changed in a major way, not because AI replaced my thinking or my voice, but because it helped me organise what I already had inside years of writing, speaking, presenting, and explaining.
Before AI, I wrote almost everything from scratch, and that meant every post felt like a new battle with a blank page. Now, I can start from existing material: old blog posts, keynote notes, training slides, customer questions, proposal ideas, or reflections from past experiences.
Over the years, I had written many articles on IoT World and my personal blog, and those articles were filled with experience, analysis, stories, opinions, and lessons that were still relevant. What I did not fully realise before was that all of that content was not old material. It was a content bank waiting to be reused.
A single blog article can now become several Threads posts, a polished LinkedIn article, a casual Facebook update, a short video script, a newsletter idea, or even a talking point for a presentation. The main idea remains the same, but the structure, tone, and length can be adjusted for each platform.
That saved me a lot of time.
More importantly, it reduced the pressure of always creating from zero.
I thought to myself, “Why should I keep starting from an empty page when I already have years of thoughts sitting quietly in my blog?”
That was a turning point.
AI gave me a better rhythm, but it did not remove my responsibility. I still had to decide what mattered, what should be published, what should be edited, what should be removed, and whether the final content sounded like me.
AI can help shape the clay, but the clay must still come from real experience.
“AI should not replace your voice. It should help your voice travel further.”
That is how I see it, because the danger is not in using AI, but in allowing AI to make us sound like everyone else.
Your Old Content May Be More Valuable Than You Think
Many founders underestimate the value of what they already have, because they assume content must always be new, fresh, and created from scratch, when in reality, some of the best content comes from old ideas explained in a clearer and more current way.
Old blog articles can become new social media posts.
Past presentation slides can become short educational content.
Customer questions can become articles.
Training notes can become carousels.
Proposal explanations can become LinkedIn posts.
Mistakes can become lessons.
Founder reflections can become trust-building stories.
Even a simple WhatsApp explanation to a customer can become the seed of a good post, because if one person asked that question, many others may be thinking about the same thing silently.
The key is to stop looking at content as a one-time activity.
Content should be treated like an asset.
You create it once, then reshape it, reuse it, update it, and distribute it in different ways depending on the platform and audience.
This is where AI becomes useful, because it can help turn raw material into different formats quickly, but the source must still be yours. Your voice, your judgement, your stories, and your understanding of the audience cannot be outsourced completely.
AI can help you move faster, but it should not make you disappear from your own content.
Lessons I Learned From Managing Personal and Business Accounts
After many years of managing both personal and company social media accounts, I have learned that clarity is more important than volume.
The first lesson is to separate the purpose of each account. Your personal account should carry your stories, reflections, opinions, values, and human experiences, while your company account should focus on customer problems, product value, use cases, industry education, credibility, and business outcomes.
The second lesson is to build a content bank before you need it. Do not wait until you are tired, busy, or under pressure before thinking about what to post, because that is when content becomes stressful. Save ideas continuously, collect useful questions, keep links to your old articles, and record your best explanations when they appear naturally.
The third lesson is to use AI as an assistant, not as a replacement. Let it help with structure, tone, rewriting, repurposing, and idea expansion, but never surrender your judgement, because AI may produce words, but only you know whether those words carry the right meaning for your audience.
The fourth lesson is to master one or two platforms first instead of trying to be everywhere at the same time. Many founders try to appear on every platform and end up weak on all of them, when they should first understand where their audience spends time and what kind of content works best there.
The fifth lesson is to respect the character of each platform. LinkedIn is suitable for professional insights and deeper reflections, Facebook allows a more personal touch, Threads feels more conversational, TikTok needs visual storytelling, and YouTube rewards those who can explain ideas with patience and consistency.
The sixth lesson is to measure what matters. Likes and views are pleasant, but meaningful comments, direct messages, serious enquiries, partnership discussions, speaking invitations, and sales leads are much better signals that your content is creating real value.
The seventh lesson is to accept that consistency matters more than perfection. A steady flow of useful and honest content is more powerful than one perfect post every few months, because people trust those who show up repeatedly with something worth saying.
Social Media Is a Marathon, Not a Firework Show
Social media is not a one-week campaign, a single viral post, or a magic trick that suddenly turns a quiet startup into a famous brand overnight. It is a long game of showing up, learning from your audience, improving your message, and staying visible without becoming a slave to the algorithm.
Some posts will perform well.
Some will disappear quietly.
Some will attract customers.
Some will attract critics.
Some will open doors you never expected.
Some will teach you what your audience truly cares about.
That is part of the process.
The founders who survive social media are not always the loudest or the most polished. Many times, they are the ones who know how to pace themselves, reuse their content wisely, protect their energy, stay clear about their message, and keep showing up even when the response is not immediate.
After all these years, I am still learning.
I am still experimenting.
I am still adjusting.
But now, with AI beside me, I no longer see social media as a monster waiting to eat my time. I see it as a set of channels that can carry my thoughts, my work, and FAVORIOT’s story to the people who need to hear it.
Not perfectly.
But consistently.
And for a founder, consistency is already a very big win.
So let me ask you this.
Are you managing your personal and business social media accounts on your own, or do you already have a team helping you? What has been your biggest challenge so far?
Share your experience in the comments.
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