The importance of telling your fanbase about Steem
There are a lot of very active social media personalities joining lately who make content about anything and everything and it's really awesome to see their interest in our platform!
For the longest time I've been advertising our platform to others who already use many social media sites in general. Content creators have realized that limiting themselves to only one is not good for their reach and there are very few of them nowadays who only focus on one platform. I'm probably the exception since the only other platform than Steem that I can browse without feeling the urge to smash my head into a wall is Reddit, but anywhere you look you can see people advertising the other platforms they are on.
So why not add Steem to the bundle? That's what I've been asking many over the years and many of them have taken me up on my offer and checked the site out even though not as many remained active here. I'm sure many of them are biting their hat now looking back at what they have missed out on.
I saw the potential in Steem very early on and I've been focusing on gaining a following here more than anywhere else. I noticed even Reddit has resorted to creating user profiles lately where you can follow people there and they all seem to be competing versus another in active userbase, but most of them don't share something that Steem has, and that's being able to reward active contributors directly and with no middle-men charges.
Of course there many other advantages to Steem and its blockchain, but I wanted to focus on this one thing in this post which is rewarding contributions and why its so important to let your fanbase on other sites know about your presence here.
It's not just cause we want as many active people as possible to join the site, they will of course join over time. If you are someone who has a big fanbase somewhere else though, it will really help to get your account here more visibility, especially once communities start rolling in. Right now we may not have the best filtering methods of there just being "trending/new/hot/promoted" but those are not big additions that will require a massive amount of work to change. The follow option has been a much better way to build your own feed into what you want to read and see daily and which followers you want to support with your voting power.
If you are a user who does have a big fanbase somewhere else and have been posting a lot here on Steemit it doesn't mean that you will necessarily get a lot of attention here. Sure you might use your "I have this many followers here" card and that could get you some voting support for some time, but if our still small active userbase are not interested in your content or you as a person, your posts won't have much engagement going. I've seen a lot of people lately who join and present themselves, but don't make an effort into letting their already existing fanbase know that they are active on Steemit and to join them there. They often get buried under the rest of the content or the authors who have managed to get a big following of Steemians and that shouldn't be a surprise to them.
Being famous on another site doesn't always necessarily mean you will automatically make a killing here. If you are making good rewards but none of your older fanbase is also using Steem to check out your content and engage with you, then over time the big influencers will get tired of supporting your work cause the views/comments to payout ratio will not look all that great - which has been a big reason in the past to why big influencers have been flagging others as they focus on those statistics. What's worse in my opinion is if you only use Steem as a way to post your material and not even engage with the community yourself - remember that Steem is a pretty new platform and the first impressions will matter a lot.
Someone who I admire in the way he has jumped into the Steem platform is @davidpakman. I've watched many of his videos without knowing who he was before he joined and you can tell that he has put a lot of effort into getting his followers into Steem as well and they have continued to support him here with their votes and comments and most of his posts are so engaging compared to many others.
That's one of the big advantages to Steem, of course as someone as big as him you can't expect him to be able to engage with all readers but the fact that he can now reward them for their contributions with votes is something very unique to our platform and a big reason why you should get your other followers onto Steem to support your content here as well. It's pretty much a win-win-win for everyone involved.
I hope many of the newcomers will look at @davidpakman as a great example.
I initially thought that while STEEM was just in beta, I would just try it out myself and perhaps invite my most tech/crypto-enthusiastic friends to steemit. However, as more good creators come onto the platform, I do see the value of sharing it go up.
Still, though, it is worth reminding people that you invite that STEEM is still young and should not be judged as a final product. The excitement should not be about "here is this fantastic website that is so much better than your existing social media because it pays you money!", but rather "we now have the opportunity to be early users of something that could be huge and, just by being users, obtain a small stake similar to holding early stocks in Facebook".
I think 2018 can be a huge year for STEEM, so buckle up people and be ready for high velocity :)
Fair points man.
I had no followers elsewhere, so the grind it has been and will continue to be for me. I actually prefer it this way, because it makes me feel that I earned them by working hard - not just because I might slap a nice vote on them.
This is a real bug-bearer of mine. And it's not exclusive to whales/orcas's. Even the smaller accounts are not engaging in the the replies to their blogs. And mainly, it's the ones that have the auto-vote support in place already.
This is disappointing as it's where the new users will head, and then see 40/50/60 comments without a reply. What are they going to think to that?!
Cheers!
Yeah, it should be important to know that even as a big influencer you should put in some "grind" time into Steem.
If you can't reply to all comments, a small vote on good ones that shows you read and acknowledged them goes a long way!
I am trying to promot the STEEM around me, but I think we need some extra attractive contents on youTube vs. I hope the community will grow more soon
@racoo
Yeah a vote is certainly a show of engagement on the worthwhile comments.
If you have a popular blog, e.g. Yours 😁 You can't be expected to reply to everyone, but I think you are likely to gain support if there are replies (and votes) to anything worthwhile.
Cheers!
I've always had a policy of replying to everyone, no matter what they say (unless it's truly hateful trolling) on ALL platforms I use. It's a lot of work, but if you batch it up it's really not that bad and you learn so much about people! You're a great example of the hustle n' grind dude :)
~ Kevin
A sound policy to have, for the reasons mentioned above.
And thanks man, if you ain't got talent, there's always hustle n grind to fall back on! Cheers!
I know!! I have been teaching people to respond to comments in their posts but these new folks complain that it is too much work.
Engagement is work. To build a relationship demands that two of you communicate and respond. Especially if they provide a good counterpoint or add to your post then reward that by acknowledging it.
I don't want followers I want engagers that not necessarily need to upvote me but if they do thanks. I need them to comment, to discuss to argue even but I want a reaction. Even a resteem would be nice rather than nothing.
Sure I have my been celebrating the numbers of followers I got but more than that I celebrate looking at my numbers and see 32 % engagement. I'm a nobody but that number is good for me.
32% engagement, how is that calculated if you don't mind me asking?
Well I am pretty new to Steemit analytics and have not used the more complex ones that you use.
The 32% is only a 7 day info on the posts I generate and from the social insights from steem.supply.
Data may be an anomaly this week since this is the first time i have attempted to analyze my data because of a curated post but it is amazing what kind of information is out there.
Yeah, I'm pretty new here. I spent many many years almost exclusively on reddit and don't really care about followers. Don't get me wrong, if the followers are genuinely interested in one another and are looking to connect for more reasons than just to have a network of people to upvote their content then I'm all in.
I was just really hoping to find a place that had quality content and an engaging community. While I find a lot of the content pretty interesting I just don't feel the sense of community here. I hope I'm wrong, but like the old saying goes, whatever you incentivize is what you're going to get. It just seems like the reward system is so much of the focus here that engaging in a community gets deemphasized. That's a good recipe for a place that gets real boring real fast.
I'm still hopeful and I'm going to try to adapt to the way things are done here. I just hope that something with more depth grows out of this.
For now, the community built around a key posters blogs. E.g. @acidyo's fantasy football league, or on (too) many discord channels.
There is hope this will change with a 'community' style update to the UI here, but until I see it I'm unsure how it will pan out.
Cheers!
And cheers to you as well!
I'll be keeping an eye out for your posts. You'll see me in your comments, I'll be the guy behind the walls of text, lol. A reddit habit that I'm going to have to break so I don't look so out of place here😜
Hi as I come from a gaming community that have a lot of our players do Twitch and YouTube videos one of the most compelling argument they have is the lifespan of rewards and the buggy nature of DTube since it is still in beta.
Noob question for DTube because I have not used it to upload content and get rewards yet but it will still follow the 7 day rewards right? I'll be happy to be corrected on this.
Although a lot of the engagement happens during the live broadcast some of the traffic also comes from the 3-2 weeks period.
It's fine for those that post their games on a daily basis by for those that only post 2-3 videos a week the potential lost in revenue is significant.
Also with the bugs in dTube especially in uploading nothing frustrates a person faster than leaving the upload and coming back to errors and not supported format.
Then there is the matter of cross platform posting as we all know Facebook has been aggressive lately with Steemit URLs and redirects often tagging it as blocked or spam.
So I really want some of our gamers to come over.
The change can start from me. It has been on my list to start uploading my gaming footage but I have to choose one that doesn't make me seem too much of a noob haha.
Yes it does, to the 7 day max reward issue the only counter I have for it is that as long as you keep half of your rewards in SP in the long run it will be the same as accumulative rewards for older content. Not only that but over time with activity and being consistent you grow your account and receive readers that will vote on your content more often (since everyone gets 10 votes a day) and also autovoters on your content. + curation rewards you can earn yourself with your stake and knowing that the amount of new SP will only go down over time thus making your stake worth more.
All in all I think I'd much rather have SP that grows in interest over time than re-occurring rewards on older posts.
That being said there is nothing stopping people from creating a front-end with ads for instance that allows content creators to get revenue from views on older posts in the form of Steem.
Hello @acidyo I am trying to UpVote your posts,
Can you make some of my POSTS Upvoted please, @racoo
But wouldn't it cause a problem that it is a place holder for upvotes for older content?
I think I read it somewhere that if you pass off work that did not have major changes or added something new that you could be flagged for it as it appears to be just a money Grab attempt?
Sorry if I have a lot of questions.
I am just about to do this with my website and YouTube channel (https://www.epicgardening.com and https://www.youtube.com/c/epicgardening). The tricky part for me is that my audience is somewhat older. Only the hydroponics folks are younger and might take to this idea.
Have you seen any great examples of introducing an audience to Steemit? You kind of only get one shot at it and I don't want to mess it up when I make the play. I have a LOT of traffic on those two properties and I want to grow Steemit as much as possible, so I don't want to @#$% up.
~ Kevin
I'd suggest explaining to them the basics of Steem and why it's so revolutionary. They will of course have a lot to earn but joining is the first step, and of course also mention that it can take some time to get approved for an account so they don't get disappointed quickly and lose interest. :)
Doing this over the next week or two! Easing them in :)
As an artist, photographer and someone trying to build a spiritual magazine I hve been on the lot of them.. or most.. Twitter, insta, snapchat, deviant art, Flickr, Pinterest, etsy, Facebook building probably hundreds of thousands of followers. I got work and business from them over the years but I actually had probably only broke even for jobs vs time spent not to mention I actually paid to advertise or buy followers etc. Since I found steemit I mostly forget to even post on them anymore and have to remind myself to keep my foot int he door on a few. Have managed to get a fair few friends to migrate here also.
Hey @acidyo
Do you know why you see other programs getting promoted on social media and why @steemit isn't? it's because of referral/affiliate program.
People get commission on purchases and sign ups and that's why people love to promote these programs on their social media accounts and blogs.
I've an article on it please check it here → 6 reasons Steemit need a referral program Today
If #steemit introduces a referral or affiliate program, everyone will start to promote it on other networks.
What do you think about it?
A referral program was discussed at Steemfest 2 and will most likely come to Steem soon, hopefully before we are out of beta but have the signups fixed to work much faster.
A referral program can sky rocket Steemit promotions, people will start to use their referral link as Email Signature, they will share their referral links on social medias, bloggers will start writing blog posts like "10 ways to increase your Steemit earning".
I hope this feature launches soon.
I think there's a major issue with onboarding that is stopping influencers from encouraging people to join. It's technically complicated, and an introduction to steemit post on any media quickly turns into a support thread. Having an infrastructure of a sort to handle the fanbase influx is more than necessary.
The main issue with dragging my ~4,000 followers on Facebook over to Steemit is the fact I will need to help onboard them or feel responsible for them shitposting or being stupid on the platform because they don't quite understand it. Since I really don't have the time to instruct thousands of my Facebook friends, sneaky little me established a little community of Israeli steemians on Facebook, slowly inviting promising authors, and @yairdd invested in creating an account to put together all the guides and tutorials.
I have yet to start an official campaign on my profile, but I now have the infrastructure. Basically - prepare yourself for a crowd of Israeli authors as soon as I get through some much needed work stuff.
@techslut I agree, when I onboarded my friends @pstalks @sushantgodam and @tauseefkhan they were really confused about how Steemit works. What's difference between Steem, Steem Dollar and Steem power.
I think, if we make someone signup Steemit, it's our responsibility to educate about how Steemit works. It's not about posting crappy images and quotes, it's about quality contribution. Isn't it?
Community is everything, as I discovered when I first joined MSP. The feeling you get by helping, supporting and pushing other Steemians to do great things gives such a great deal of satisfaction.
I took what I learned at MSP and used it at The Writers' Block. We concentrate on creating good content, but are also trying to bring in new fiction fans through our social media efforts.
I agree :)
There have been few Filipino celebrities joining Steemit this past week, and i'm glad to know that they see the potential of this platform to connect more to people not only locally but worldwide. Steemit is really getting some "steam" recently despite what is happening to the crypto world, and that says a lot about how wonderful this community is.
Cheers and have a blessed day @acidyo!
And also, more gaming videos to come! :)
Awesome! :)
Aside from Path of Exile, i'm also trying MU Legends and Secret World Legends and maybe Elder Scrolls Online. But work and Steemit keeps me too busy now. :D
So, an Instagram influencer joins Steemit and invite his followers. Sounds intriguing. However once the influencer followers join Steemit they might soon forget about their favorite Instagram influencer which isn't something that should bother us in general..
lol