That's pretty much exactly the playbook that I am using.
If you don't have a following you don't have social clout.
If you don't have social clout you are in that bottom tier where people don't see the need to engage with.
I don't expect that high clout people like Jim Cramer or Elon Musk engage, but in general especially Twitter is a black hole.
I had good experience with getting followers on LinkedIn and Medium, but that was mainly based on a lot of work that I had put in to engage with people and write content. At some point in time, I was in the top 5% business writers in the world. Yet, from a monetization perspective that was a flat 0. So given that experience, I might be the worst social marketer since I am not being able to earn 10 bucks on common social media.
How close is your approach to what they described, and did you actually make <$10?
That would make it a lot less enticing :)