I’ve been racking my brain with how to spread the word about Steemit and I sort of stumbled across a couple over the last couple days in my reinvigorated excitement about the platform. Up until now, I’ve been trying to rely strictly on passive things like linking to and talking about Steemit.com on Facebook and other social media and message boards. A problem with this is that many of the places I’m trying to post this stuff to have active algorithms that suppress links to Steemit. I mean, can you blame them? It threatens these sites’ very existence that Steemit is around. Needless to say, I haven’t had much luck posting links and messages on Facebook in this way. It’s just crickets.
On the Facebook front, I stumbled across a really good original post from one of my friends, and thought to myself “this would do really well on Steemit.” So I proceeded to tell her so. After a series of questions and answers she seemed interested enough that she’ll probably set up an account. And this is a person who is very skilled at the original meaning of “social network,” in that she is a nucleus of communication and gathering in her community. If a person like her gets on Steemit and gets excited about it, hundreds of people will also do the same in short order, Facebook’s algorithms be damned.
Another method I stumbled across yesterday was while talking to a stranger about things he’s interested in and doing with his life. I found out that due to a motorcycle injury, he has had to put his professional parkour career on hold. He travels a lot, is super active on social media as part of his lifestyle, and he’s into things like photography and blogging. I was like “Holy shit dude! You’ve gotta go check out this website called Steemit. Your stuff will do really well there.” He had a few pointed questions about it, but when I explained the details to him, he seemed pretty stoked about the idea of setting up an account just for giggles. I mean, the dude’s out of work right now, so I think he’s probably going to just to see if he can make some money with what he’s already doing.
A couple years ago, I read a book called The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell talked about all of the things that make a trendy thing explode into the popular media, and it’s super low tech and old school the way he explained it happening. It’s through particular types of people that these ideas have always (and still do) spread. If we want to spread the word about Steemit and make it explode onto the scene like we all think it should, we need to start doing it in person or with direct one-to-one electronic communication, and with the right kinds of people. If you haven’t read the book, I would highly recommend checking it out. It’s an easy read, and it will explain the things we as a community need to do to get Steemit to go mainstream. Steem On!
Image attribution: User geralt on Pixabay. Located at https://pixabay.com/en/mobile-phone-smartphone-keyboard-1917737/