I have recently been thinking about how we can grow the number of users past just the crypto community and into a more mainstream crowd who would never stumble upon Steemit organically. This made me think about how people discover new sites through Facebook, reddit and other larger media sites, and it is through sharing. I mentioned before that we don’t necessarily need to compete against reddit or facebook on a mass scale to be successful if we create a niche of followers, just the growth of internet users will be enough to move Steemit forward. So this is how we can set our platform up for organic growth through sharing our articles elsewhere.
If you look at mainstream youtubers who have videos go viral they are often upset at facebook for allowing their videos to be copied and more often than not the copied videos have a massive amount of views compared to the youtuber. While they see that as lost revenue for their channel, it also exposes them to a large amount of publicity and notoriety they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. People will search out for their youtube channel and now every video they make they will have a larger audience. I think we need to do the same thing for Steemit. Just like how buzzfeed took over many of the facebook link shares and posts, if we bring content and share it with a Steemit link, people will naturally and organically look into how the site works.
What is the first thing you notice when you finish reading an article? Simple, it’s the monetary amount that someone is earning at the bottom for that article. If people who are coming from social media sites see that you can make a few hundred dollars an article they are going to explore on their own and dig deep into the crypto space. I think people, especially younger people are smarter than we give them credit for and although they might not understand the system at first, they will work to understand it. Part of the beauty of Steemit is that we can post original content, have followers and get paid very quickly for our work. To many who have the ability to make great content, but cant spend hours upon hours a week putting in work to grow a follower base, there is still a possibility to be seen because of the size of this community.
It has been pretty obvious that the steem price spiked and is now moving more towards an equilibrium, but it has also been obvious that many posters have stopped making content. This creates room for new accounts to come in and put in effort at the bottom level while possibly reaping rewards in the long term. I have always said that if we want to increase the value of steem that we need to retain new users and incentivize people to buy the currency to get started. The easiest way to do this is by creating a large new potential user base, which can be done by sharing articles elsewhere. The amount of success these niche facebook groups have had with getting followers off of stolen content is a testament to how many people can actually be acquired by this tactic.
My proposal is to create a facebook group that will compile some of steemit’s best content and share it out to the world. We can all do our part by sharing articles on Steemit through our own private facebook accounts so people can experience the site. We don’t need to do anything but link the articles we find interesting that the facebook group shares and organically we will grow the subscriber base of the facebook group and the userbase of the Steemit website. When many people are pitched something like “make money off of writing articles”, it can come off as a scam. There is so much shit on the internet these days that people aren’t going to try something if it even looks a tiny bit like it could be fake, which is the large problem I had with getting people to believe that I was making money through Steemit. However if we just post the article and let people discover it on their own, it can lead to organic growth through actual interest in the articles.
Im not sure who would run the facebook group , but I know there are very many good candidates out there to do it. I think in the long term if we stick at it and put some of the more interesting content on the group which we can all follow and share to our friends and family, we can capture a large amount of new users. This type of guerilla tactic versus flat out inviting people to the site in this day in age, in my opinion, will prove much more successful in getting users and peaking the interest in non crypto people.
-Calaber24p