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I think it is a mix. My friends list is full of people who already know about Steem, and seem disinterested in actually joining or posting. At the same time, many still read the articles.

I think that it might be beneficial to do something similar to communities here on Steem (similar to what my father is doing), and setup pages on Facebook to share quality posts about specific (and thematic to the page) concepts which people might find interesting. In this case, these pages could be established as a quality source of information, and might reflect well on Steem. But there is the problem of taking the time to run and promote the page (there is a way to pay for promotion which we haven't pursued in our pages).

I will say that some of the people I have tried to recruit (from my friend circle) did wind up joining after a few conversations, but many were discouraged by low payouts and very little feedback from the community. If you were to use facebook as a recruiting mechanism, you might try ensure that new users have a positive first experience.

So in summary, Facebook is better to share to a smaller group of people who are interested in the content. Twitter is better for sharing to a larger group of people who might not be as interested in the content.

For an example of one of my friends who did join, check out @astronomyizfun. Sadly, our school network blocks Steem from our school computers (even at home). His only computer is his school computer so he hasn't been able to access Steem for the last year.

That is a shame about the blocking of Steem.

Do you think their is potential to get more school students on Steem?

That is a tricky question. Do I think that school students would benefit from , and enjoy Steem? Yes. But the challenge is to get them to take the time it takes to sign up and learn about it.

My father and I talked about this, and we think there are four obstacles: Days of waiting for account completion, confusion about the need for keys and the long master password, widespread suspicion of cryptocurrency, and absence of trendiness.

I have advertised Steem for 4 years in any and every way to anyone and everyone who would hear me (everyone in my school has heard about it at some point), and yet only a small number of people from my school joined, only a few posted at all, and only 1 actually stuck around for more than a few weeks.

For recruiting from schools, my father thinks that there's something to be learned from the way Facebook began its roll-out in the early 2000s by focusing on and saturating one college at a time, and I think that it's important to reward posts that don't require long attention spans but still demonstrate quality.

Thanks for this feedback.

We are certainly working on making the signup procedure quicker and easier, and for making the whole onboarding process smoother.

Very interesting idea about the original Facebook roll-out method. I wonder how we could use that sort of approach with Steem...?

The Steemit Team

Very interesting idea about the original Facebook roll-out method. I wonder how we could use that sort of approach with Steem...?

This is not my forté, but for whatever it's worth, here's some brainstorming:

  • Start with colleges, not high schools, just to minimize potential legal/regulatory/ethical issues with recruiting students under the age of 18.
  • Pick a few starting colleges
  • Set up a "fast pass" to the account creation process so students from those schools can get quick/immediate account creation.
  • Set up and manage Steem communities for the schools.
  • Identify on-campus "influencer" students from other social media platforms or other research (maybe focus on comp. sci., journalism, communications, and other "friendly" majors?)
  • Hire some of them into 1-semester part time jobs to bootstrap the schools' communities with photography, videos, or articles about campus life; to share those articles with followers on other platforms; and to recruit their peers into the Steem community.
  • Provide them with guidelines about privacy, copyright, key security, accessing exchanges, etc.
  • Advertise on campus, near campus, in the school newspaper, give away T-shirts & gear to students, etc...
  • Make sure the communities are well-curated & moderated until they get off the ground. Keep rewards at realistic levels to manage expectations, but don't let them be ignored.
  • Partner with Appics, Actifit, and/or others on the initiative?
  • At the end of the semester, transfer community ownership to... someone... not sure who... faculty? admin? student? alumni assoc? endowment? Might vary by school...
  • New semester, new schools. Experiment with different sizes and types of schools. Revise the program and scale up for more schools per semester as time passes.
  • Hopefully, at some point, the network effect will take over and new schools will start coming online without active recruitment efforts. Not sure why, but for some reason the number "50" sticks in my head for the number of schools when Facebook hit some sort of tipping point. Maybe achievable in 3-4 years?

Don't know how useful any of this is, but that's what came to mind for me.

Thank you for this. Some excellent ideas here.

I will bring this into our 'ideas folder' to see how it could be picked up in our future planning.

Thank you for all this information - it is most useful.

We must find ways of picking up on some of these ideas - particularly on Facebook.

Have you seen any evidence that Facebook might block links to steemit.com ?

I have not tried to use one in years because I started use Steempeak links due to the fact that Steemit links didnt embed properly back then.

Good to know those links aren't blocked.

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