As a member of the Hive blockchain community, you're no doubt passionate about seeing our platform grow and thrive. But have you ever stopped to consider who holds the key to unlocking its full potential?
The answer, in my opinion, is influencers. These creators and tastemakers have the power to bring in large, engaged audiences and create a virtuous cycle of growth.
In this article, we'll delve into why influencers are crucial to the Hive blockchain's success, what they want, and how our already-great platform can adapt to be the perfect home for them.
By the end, you'll have a roadmap for how to attract and retain top influencers on the Hive blockchain.
So let's get started!
Defining Our Terms
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of how Hive can attract influencers, it's important to define a few key terms.
First, what exactly are influencers? These are people with a large following who create content that their audience loves. They may be YouTube creators, Instagram personalities, or writers on platforms like Medium. Essentially, they're the ones driving attention on the internet.
On the other hand, their audience is made up of people who consume this content and may even be willing to spend money to support their favorite creators. These people are often loyal to a few key influencers, and will consume their content repeatedly.
It's important to understand both sides of this equation, as we'll see how Hive can appeal to both influencers and their audience as we move forward.
Why Target Influencers?
As we build out the Hive blockchain, it's easy to focus on features that will attract and keep our audience. And while these features are certainly necessary, they're not enough on their own.
At the end of the day, what really brings people to a social platform is good content to consume. And who creates this content? Influencers.
Targeting influencers is inherently a leveraged growth strategy. Reaching out to one influencer with 100,000 followers can give you instant access to their entire audience, while trying to attract the same number of people one by one requires more resources and time.
By targeting influencers, we can not only attract a larger, more engaged audience, but we can also create a virtuous cycle of growth. As more influencers join the Hive blockchain and share their content, it will become an even more attractive destination for their followers and other influencers, and the cycle will continue.
So let's dive into what influencers want, and how the Hive blockchain can provide it.
What Do Influencers Want?
Influencers generally want two things: to grow their audience and to monetize that attention.
To grow their audience, influencers rely on platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Medium. These platforms provide them with a huge audience and the tools to reach them. But you never know when terms of use might change or algorithms shift – both of which can harm an influencer's business opportunities.
To monetize their attention, influencers rely on a variety of methods including ad revenue, selling products/merch, and Patreon-like platforms. These solutions come with their own downsides as well, such as heavy fees, lack of control, and the same risk of term or algorithm changes.
But there's a lurking need as well: owning their content, followers, and community. On traditional social media, an influencer's content, followers, and community can all be taken away with a single algorithm change or policy update. The influencer is left at the whims of a company, instead of being in control of all they created.
Hive's Current Strong-Points for Influencers
The Hive blockchain, in it's current form, offers a partial solution to the problems above. By providing a decentralized, community-owned platform, we can give influencers the security, predictability, and confidence they need to while they're growing and monetizing their audience while providing some other great benefits as well.
Ownership: On the Hive blockchain, influencers truly own their content and their followers. This means that they can build a long-term monetization strategy without worrying about a single algorithm change or policy update taking everything away.
Immediate monetization: Influencers can monetize their content on the Hive blockchain immediately, without any fees or delays. This allows them to start earning money from their audience right away.
Easy Web 3.0: The Hive blockchain makes it easy for influencers to take advantage of dedicated tokens, NFTs, and community sites. This can help them build stronger, more engaged communities around their content.
Hive's Current Major Short-coming for Influencers
Despite these benefits, there is one major weak-point for influencers on the Hive blockchain: it's not yet a great platform for growing their audience. The Hive blockchain doesn't yet have the same reach as traditional social media platforms, not even close in fact, and so influencers can't rely on it to have the same impact as these other platforms when it comes to growing an audience.
The good news, is that this problem is naturally solved if we simply have more influencers join the Hive blockchain.
But, if they're not coming to Hive to grow their audience, then where can we naturally best help them? Where can we be focusing development and features to attract and create the virtuous cycle? We focus on monetization. We focus on the backend processes that Influencers rely on in order to engage with an already built community.
Let's dive into some potential features that would help influencers monetize their audience faster, better, and more securely.
Features to Help Influencers Monetize Their Audience
If we want to see Hive become the go-to platform for influencers, we need to focus on features that help them monetize their audience. In this section, we'll take a look at some ideas for tools and features that could make it easier for influencers to generate revenue from their content and followers.
The most important feature (IMO)
Locked Content: The ability to lock content behind a paywall would be huge for influencers. This could be done using Hive tokens, NFTs, or even standard fiat payment methods. Right now, all content on Hive is public and not encrypted. Adding locked content would make Hive a solid alternative to platforms like Patreon and Udemy/Skillshare.
Other good features
Content Migration: One of the biggest challenges for influencers is moving their content from traditional Web 2 platforms to Hive's Web 3 blockchain-based platform. We need to make this process as easy as possible so influencers can quickly move their content and followers over. This could also serve as a permanent backup of their content on the blockchain.
Easy Merch Shops: A platform that allows influencers to create and sell merchandise with crypto tokens and fiat payment methods would be a great way for them to monetize their audience. This could be a separate platform or integrated into existing content-based platforms.
Intimate Content Distribution: Giving subscribers an exclusive way to access and read content could help influencers monetize their audience more effectively. This could include things like a dashboard showing which posts you've read or not, subscriptions for exclusive content, or email newsletters. These features could replace or supplement existing content-based platforms.
These are just a few ideas, but I'm sure there are more we could all come up with.
Wrapping it Up
We've explored how influencers are key to growing the Hive blockchain and why it's important to focus on features that help them monetize their audience. By building a platform that addresses the challenges influencers face on traditional social media, we can create a virtuous cycle of growth and engagement on Hive.
It's up to the community to decide which features are worth building and how best to implement them, but some possibilities include locked content, content migration, easy merch shops, and intimate content distribution. These features can help make Hive the premier destination for influencers looking to monetize their audience and create meaningful relationships with their followers.
Let's work together to attract influencers to the Hive blockchain and unlock the next stage of our growth. Thank you for reading and let's unlock the next stage of Hive's growth together! 🐝🤝🚀
So, what do you think? Are these the right features to focus on? Are there others that we should consider? Let me know in the comments.
Also, while I'm not a developer, I love Hive and think this strategy could be a game-changer for unlocking growth for our blockchain. If you're a developer who is working on or considering working on any of the features mentioned in this article, I'd love to lend my thoughts and support to your efforts if you'd find that valuable. Just let me know.