Marketing for Steemit's Future: WHO Are We Reaching, HOW and WHY?

With various marketing initiatives currently going on with Steemit, I got to thinking a little bit about how we best promote our community.

One of the dangers you run into in a ecosystem like Steemit is the fact that we have a tendency to become a little bit insular. By insular I mean that people who start creating content here already have a "built in audience," so there's very little incentive to go outside the safety of our gated walls to find new readers.

Aside from that, finding new readers outside our community doesn't even do you that much good because if they are not already community members they're not gonna be able to upvote you, right?

One of the important things to remember — when trying to grow a community — is the fact that not everything you do is going to be something that benefits yourself, directly.

Now I should hasten to say that I'm not trying to get into some sort of discussion as to whether people need their rewards or not, that's not my point here. My point is that if the community grows and has more and more people using it, we all end up benefiting in the long run.

In The Beginning

But getting back on point here, I wanted to go back and briefly revisit how I found my way to Steemit in the first place.

Particularly important as part of this story is the fact that I did not find my way here because anybody was advertising Steemit!

I found my way here because somebody shared a link in a Facebook message to me saying that an article he had read was interesting in the way it offered different perspectives on a topic we were both interested in. And so he sent me this link and simply said "what do you think of this?"

And so, I read this article (about universal basic income), written by a Steemit author, and after having read what was a pretty decent article and subsequently following a fairly long line of commentary below the article, I reached the point where it occurred to me "why have I never heard of this Steemit place before? Is this like another Medium?" And then I did some exploration from there.

Granted, I'm a long time blogger and at the time I still was feeling the aftereffects of the "virtual death" of what used to be known as "social blogging" back in the early 2000's. It was this genre always liked and I was never particularly happy about the fact that MySpace and Facebook more or less killed it.

Of course I've had many many blogs over the years, but most of them have been niche oriented and not particularly social.

But I'm digressing again.

The point of my telling this story is that this particular person found their way to Steemit as a result of somebody already on here publishing content that was of interest to an external audience. What's more, it was of interest to a potentially fairly niche oriented external audience.

What's my point?

What's Your "In?"

Sometimes the best way to promote a place isn't actually to promote "the place," but simply to share how you use that place with an external audience that is actually more interested in the content than the platform supplying the content. Certainly a small footnote at the end of your article saying "this particular article was published on Steemit and blah blah blah blah..." would be both useful and appropriate.

Now, I'm well aware that there are a lot of people for whom Steemit was their very first social content experience. As such, I can hardly hold myself forth as being typical, having had probably two dozen blogs over the past 25 years, and not only having some fairly old social media profiles but also serving as admin and moderator and a number of large Facebook groups and other freestanding web communities.

That said, I do consider myself to have at least somewhat more than a rudimentary knowledge of the psychology of how groups are formed and thrive. And one of the core ingredients in that is that whereas you can be a participant in something definitely for the purposes of deriving some sort of benefit to yourself, the only way groups thrive is when a substantial number of users also take on the role of builders, and without provocation find their own ways to leverage their niche interest into helping the overall community.

Interestingly enough, after all these years only some of my niche interests are actually well represented on Steemit.

Art is definitely fairly well represented, and writing is fairly well represented. Gardening is somewhat represented and pets are somewhat represented. Metaphysics and psychology are only thinly represented, as is things like antiques and collectibles.

Going Forwards by Going Backwards...

I spent a little time looking at some of my other (external) blogs which are still live and they're in various locations, and even with the relative neglect they have suffered over the past decade or so quite a few of them still have a fair number of monthly eyeballs looking at them.

Just looking at the six busiest, I seem to have anywhere between 800 and 3,000 monthly unique viewers, added together getting relatively close to 10,000 viewers a month.

Which makes me consider an experiment of writing something that is specifically geared towards one of these niches, or maybe towards all of them, while completely ignoring any appeal to the Steemit community audience, just to see what would happen.

Which brings me face-to-face with something that perhaps we're lacking a little bit here, as far as community building tools go. Well, two things, actually.

They have removed the page view counters that were here when I first was part of Steemit and that would be sort of essential to see whether anybody who is reading any given post actually came from elsewhere. The other thing we're missing is some kind of referral system. Not a "referral system" in the sense that I expect to get paid for signing up people, but a referral system in the sense that by putting your tracking code within the URL link to an article, you would be able to tell whether somebody became a Steemit member as a result of using that particular link.

Which brings us to what is perhaps the third weakness of our community which is the lack of a at least semi adequate even if basic internal message system.

If I recommend Steemit to my friend Bob and he signs up I have no way of knowing that he signed up, nor the ability to actually message Bob and offer him help! And that's a bit problematic.

And yes you can come along and tell me "yeah, well, but you can just sign up for Discord!"

That misses the point completely! When your friend joins Facebook — clearly a social network — you don't have to sign up for Discord to talk to them! You talk to them right there!

I should probably bring this ramble to a close before it becomes too horribly long!

At this point, I am just in the thinking stages and examining the possibilities, and checking out the attendant challenges. I haven't really cared that much before, but since there seems to be a more concerted effort to start building here again, it seems like the time to get something going!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

How about you? How do YOU think Steemit would be best marketed? Do you think "niche" marketing is a better approach than "general" marketing? Or would it not make a difference? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.06.08 00:37 PDT
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