Here’s the first thing to realize when it comes to social media: it changes behaviors. There are many things people do on social media that they wouldn’t dream of doing in real life. This is both a good and bad thing, although we normally tend to focus on the bad parts of it.
There’s a good reason for that though. It turns everything we do and say into a performance for others. It’s not just about the conversations we are having, but it’s for others to see the conversations we are having.
And that comes down to the business model of social media: to capture and monetize our attention.
When we are paying attention to something, advertisers get excited. They know that all they have to do is inject themselves into the field of view, and someone might buy something.
But beyond that, the people on social media have started to realize something: having a large audience is a powerful thing. Maybe you can sell things to them, maybe you can coordinate them into doing things, maybe you can avoid feelings of loneliness because there’s always someone to talk to.
Let’s focus on 1 piece of audience-building though: monetization.
Monetization Strategies
How can you implement monetization strategies with a social media audience?
There are an infinite number of ways, honestly, but we can take a look at a couple to get started.
If you’ve got a large enough audience, you can just develop partnerships with companies and mention their product. That’s a pretty solid marketing play and only requires having a large audience. This model is the basis for “influencers”. But the downside is that if you don’t have a large audience, companies won’t care about you, and therefore this is only open to larger creators.
There’s also the affiliate model. This is similar to the previous model, but you essentially have an affiliate link for one or more products, and you try to convince people to buy from your link. Then you get a percentage of sales. Have a viral post, then drop it in the comments hoping people will buy. Not a great model, but people try it.
Using it as a personal distribution channel: this is the best way to go. As you build an audience, you can leverage that audience to distribute your own products. Maybe it’s an information product, like a book or a course, or maybe it’s a D2C product. Maybe it’s a SaaS. Doesn’t matter. The piece that matters is that it’s your product being distributed via your audience. This is the most direct and most efficient route to monetizing an audience, although it requires that you’ve built a product.
Capturing Attention Online
In order to build an audience, you’ve got to get some attention. Here’s the problem: you’re competing for attention with everyone else on a given social media platform. So how can you stand out?
There are a ton of nuanced ways you can do so, and if you study marketing, you’ll start to understand how to do this better. But let’s think about the average person online: do they study marketing? Or do they simply want to make the numbers go up, so they follow what they see others doing who are having success? (Hint: it’s the second)
Imagine you are going about your day, and you hear a loud crash from outside your window.
Are you going to run and check it out? Or just ignore it and go about your day?
Social media is the same way. Did you see the viral video lately about the dude losing his shit on the airplane? There’s a reason for that.
As humans, we tend to be attracted to extremes. So if you want to build an audience, something you can do is focus on the extreme version of what you are selling. It will be polarizing, but you’ll attract people faster even though you’ll drive a portion of people away from you.
So when you combine the fact that you can be extremes in order to build an audience faster, and that audience is a powerful distribution network, you can see how many of the people on Twitter and other social media networks came to be the way they are.
Next week, we’ll examine how the rate of audience growth impacts the strength of audience, and how that affects how valuable a given audience is.
Updates on Choose Your Algorithm
I’m continuing to put a bunch of work into Choose Your Algorithm. But the biggest thing I worked on last week was a way to demonstrate a use for it. I’m a big fan of the Danny Miranda podcast, and on it, he typically asks his guests to issue a challenge to the audience.
In one of his recent episodes, he talked about how nice it would be to have a list of the challenges from all of the guests who issued them.
So I built a search engine that could help you find a challenge based on what you were looking for!
https://www.chooseyouralgorithm.com/challenges - 8 May 2023 - Watch Video