Preview

What is the one thing we all use to measure social media and entertainment app accounts? Follower and subscriber count, right? It is there starting us in the face when we go to any account. The problem comes when follower count, likes, shares, and the rest of the digital gold stars, are all we are focusing on and we forget our purpose and why we are doing this in the first place. The social media platforms have been gamified to keep you on the hamster wheel. As long as you are getting equal benefit it is a symbiotic relationship. But how many times have you found yourself doing what it takes to get the likes up and forget to ask whether what you are doing serves your purpose as much as it does your social media platform’s purpose? Today I want to talk about the dangers of getting carried away with getting your digital gold stars and how to regain the focus on your purpose for doing this in the first place.

What is the Niche content Creator

My name is Bill Strand. You are listening to the Niche Content Creator Podcast. Here we look at the different aspects of creating content in today’s world.This podcast is a sharing of my experience in how I used digital outreach tools and content creation to bring community together and experience tremendous personal growth in the niche of my passion. It is a journal of how to survive the grind and achieve your goals.

Introduction to the Situation

When YouTube sends out plaques for achievement they send them out after certain subscriber count milestones. When some one on Instagram or TikTok is successful we look at their follower number. Follower or subscriber number is the first sign of success. It drives first impressions and opens doors for the creator. To be sure, the importance of your engagement rate comes soon enough when brands are thinking about supporting you. But now math has to be done. If math is being done on your account, someone somewhere has decided you were worth the time to do math. So, when we hear people talk about followers as a vanity metric that really doesn’t mean anything we nod our heads because it sounds right, but deep inside there is cognitive dissidence. Because we know, whether it should or shouldn’t be, follower count is how you are first judged. So it makes sense that we put attention to keeping our follower count growing at all times.

The Problem: Social media wants you to work for them

But here is the problem, making your follower number ratchet up does not mean you are getting quality followers that care about what your purpose is. Say you specialize in Bavarian cuckoo clocks and you visit the homeland in Germany. You post all sorts of images and short form video about your tour of the factory and the beautiful hand crafted clocks. But, it is a video of you walking through the beautiful Black Forest in Germany that suddenly goes viral. And your account literally doubles in followers. Your account now looks like an Instagram behemoth and you are now playing in the big leagues! Except, you realize your engagement is not doubling. You find out that the bulk of your new followers are people who love travel, Germany, and hiking. And then you notice how many accounts are foreign with no posts or are obviously fake accounts. Welcome to the world of success with a question mark. You realize your core group of followers who truly care about cuckoo clocks has not grown from that viral reels any more than from the standard reels. Oh well, that is just how things work. But here is the trap. What kind of reels do you post next? Do you go back to the 100 like posts showing the cuckoo clocks or do you post another couple videos from your Black Forest adventure?

We know it is important, but how much of our limited time to dedicate to social media should we spend on reach to find new followers and how much should be spent on retention which is deepening the relationship with the followers you already have?

Why this episode is important

This is an important question to ask because we are all in danger of being burnt out. The social media platforms make it so easy to be chasing their digital carrots of followers, shares, and savers that we can easily replace our feeling of satisfaction that we have done a good day’s work by serving our true follower base with a false sense of feeling good when a post gets 50% more reach than the one before. That feel good sense is the addictive dopamine drops that are like candy. They feel great when you plop them in your mouth, but you get no real sense of fulfillment and you keep popping them in your mouth searching for the satisfaction you know you need. That’s the hamster wheel of chasing likes and followers.

More than just using up our precious time, our social media activities can suck up our soul. It is an endless black hole where every post disappears and the monster immediately needs another sacrifice. And if you lose perspective and get caught up in this game it will suck you dry and leave you an empty husk. And I am not being overly dramatic here. Just talk to people who found themselves getting caught up in it. The burn-out danger is not imaginary and it sneaks up on you while wearing all the trappings of success. You end up serving the social media platform to get reach and forget to serve the followers that will complete your personal purpose for doing this in the first place. The thing is that we have to play in this arena. We are working in the candy shop and have to keep daily perspective to not slip into eating candy all day long. The likes and follows are addictive. Don’t forget your mission for that drug!

So, that is easy to say and it makes sense. But how do you go into work at the candy shop and remember your health? How do we keep focused on our purpose?

Solution: review, renew, rededicate yourself to your purpose

Getting yourself off the hamster wheel of social media gamification is not easy. The way I recommend to my clients to keep focus is to first figure out their purpose and their promise for their account. I consult with people wanting to start a business or outreach in my niche, the reptile keeping community. And I have no shortage of examples of when an obsession with growth overshadowed the true goal. Growth is important, but only after you answer the question, how are you serving the followers you already have? Those followers are the ones that will serve your purpose as you fulfill your promise to them.

As a review of terms, your purpose is why you are doing the account in the first place. In other words, what are you getting out of this? When the dust settles after a year, what metric will you use to determine how successful you were? Your promise is the service your account provides to your followers. What can your followers expect to get from this account? By keeping these two things in mind you have a measuring stick as to what posts you should make. You cannot control what posts will go viral and suddenly double your follower count. The only thing you can control is having a consistent outreach so people that do follow you know what they are getting. And, if you have planned your outreach well, they are part of the people group that will be able to help you achieve your purpose.

By reminding yourself on a daily basis what your purpose is and what your promise is you can maintain clarity. One way to keep your focus and direction clear is to word your purpose and promise clearly and then to keep it in sight. Either literally print it out and put it on a picture frame on your desk or make a digital note of it that can sit in the corner of your computer screen. Getting a tattoo on the back of your hand is getting a little extreme, but I like your enthusiasm. And just make a mental note of it each time you sit down to do your posting. Yes, it is the same words, but every day you do this will change what those words mean. You ever notice how things we read change their meaning the older we get? That is because we are reading it with different experiences and perspectives. And every day you work this social media hamster wheel your perspective changes and how you carry out your purpose and promise will become more insightful.

Concerning that purpose, whatever it is, would you be able to better realize it with 10,000 followers and 100 people who engage or with 1000 followers and 200 people who engage? It takes dedication to create active followers from the thousands of passive followers you have that will unfollow you if you don’t entertain them with your next video. It takes dedication because people aren’t expecting you to nurture your follower base. They are used to being passive observers of your content. So it will take discipline on your part to provide an experience that gets them to value your account beyond the standard entertainment accounts that are overtaking the platforms.

Now, you may be wondering why this is so important. Isn’t throwing a bunch of short form video against the wall waiting for the viral lottery to hit what this is all about? It has worked pretty well so far! Well, maybe. I mean if only 10% of your followers really care about what you are doing it is better to have 100k followers than 10k followers, right? And the answer is yes. But there is something on the horizon that is seeping into our lives that threatens to make the quantity content strategy much more difficult.

Things are getting much worse for those who create without purpose

We are starting to see AI generated content on the various platforms. And this is the start of content creators being able to create, literally, as many posts as they want. Did you ever feel overwhelmed when Instagram and TikTok were talking about posting three to five short form videos each day being the way to grow? That was absolutely an insane output. And we have since been pushed more and more to quantity. A viral video can come from any video and it is frustratingly difficult to create something to purposefully go viral.  Growth comes in the form of a lottery ticket approach. The more you play the better your odds of striking it rich. So we have been trained to create volume at the expense of creativity and quality. And, yes, it has worked. For better or for worse, throwing anything you have against the social media wall to see what sticks has paid off. I hate to say it, but that is the truth of what is going on out there.

The danger to us as content creators is that AI can easily produce 150 posts a month to allow you to post 5 times a day. And, yes, part of our response needs to be to get as familiar with AI as possible so we can use it in this content arms race. But when all these accounts are posting five mediocre posts a day that will numb the people scrolling around. The question is how unique will these AI generated posts be and how easy will it be for the public to recognize them? I hate to say that I don’t think that is going to save us who create content personally. AI will get better and better by absorbing all the newly generated original content and with tweaks from their engineers. The big question is – when more and more content out there is AI generated will there be an inbreeding situation where everything starts to be the same because all these AI bots are learning from material produced by other AI bots which studied the material produced by the AI bot that studied you? I do not think we will ever get to the point where no humans will create original content. But I am sure you can see how easy it will be for the world to become dominated by AI content. Not because there are fewer true creators, but because it is so easy to AI create. And, like anything else, there will be different levels of AI skill to the point where it may soon be totally accepted, and even a point of bragging, to use AI.

The point is that you might be forced to turn to AI just to compete with the volume output of everyone around you. What that means is that the real differentiation between creators will shift to the personal relationships you make with your audience. But this is not a new problem. People copying is already a well established phenomena. People scrape our accounts to look like us, they repurpose our material with just enough to present it as original, and some just shamelessly directly copy colors, font, thumbnails, and content. The difference with AI entering the picture is that it will be so much easier to create an entire social media account with a rich treasure trove of posts and videos. In this world where the public likes shiny jewels and doesn’t care if they are glass fakes we creators are going to have to figure out how to stay relevant.

If your account is based on inspiring sayings on a sunset image a software algorithm is here to take your job.

How to take back your audience and followers and subscribers

There is a way that we will be able to differentiate ourselves from the onslaught of volume content producers. And that is by developing personal relationships with our audience. You are already doing this when you take videos of yourself or post insight into your personal life through story-type features. You do this when you create podcasts, videos, and email newsletters which are personal instead of informational. Yes, AI will race to try and be able to recreate that human closeness. And it probably will be able to do it disturbingly well. But maybe now is a great time to start up those live sessions. Most of the popular apps have a feature where you can go live and interact with your audience.

With live sessions you have the opportunity to do informal sessions where you just go live and interact with anyone that happens to be there. Or else you can schedule a weekly show. Admittedly, scheduled Lives are difficult to get going and develop momentum. They require your audience to now be in the same place at the same time. Essentially, everything online is on demand now, which is great, but live sessions take us back to the time where you had to include your show in your daily schedule. Anyone here remember the era of TV when you would have to be ready at a certain time or you miss your show? But, more than just consumer habits, the 50k followers of yours are spread out across the world and different time zones. So you need to start building up trust that you will be reliably there and have the patience to build up your audience. Live shows have the challenge that they require synchronicity in an world that is overwhelmingly asynchronous. But challenge comes with the benefit that most people will not engage in it and it will be a long time before AI tackles that frontier.

Another way that you can differentiate yourself from the content volume onslaught is to be a community builder. This is where you highlight other people in your community. People who are copying content or are trying to win by volume won’t be helping other creators they see as competition or people who could expose them.

Real creators know that we are actually not competing. Our followers do not have to choose to follow only one of us. They can interact with as many of us that produce quality content. And it is more welcoming when followers feel like they are part of a community of creators rather than just one. So it actually benefits us creators to share other creators we respect with our followers. And here is where we come full circle to asking the question “what serves your community best?”

AI and beginner creators are going to come at it from a perspective of “look at me” and “I am awesome”. So your differentiation strategy will have to be different.

Other than live sessions, what else can you use to deepen your relationships with your audience? An email newsletter? A podcast? A Discord group? AI is coming for us on social media, but it can’t yet be a person enough to create those relationships building outreaches. Goodness knows it is only a matter of time, but we will cross that bridge when it comes for us.

Conclusion.

This episode had two main messages. The first was to make sure you are serving your true followers and not just feeding the endless black hole of social media. It was also a warning that if you have developed skills at feeding the beast with a lot of low effort posts with the intention of a couple of them getting into the viral slipstream that AI is going to be able to do quantity posts better than you. And so both of those messages end up in the same place. It will be to our benefit to figure out what our followers need to be more than a passive audience watching your performance.

So, hopefully, you can wake yourself up from the social media drone that we fall into. It is almost matrix like where we don’t feel like we are moving forward in life unless we are constantly throwing digital content sacrifices to the social media pantheon of gods. In fact, if we don’t post for a couple of days we feel like we are falling into obscurity. Imagine if we felt that way about the gym or eating vegetables! But I encourage you to take a moment to yourself. Sit down with a cup of coffee or go for a walk. Re-evaluate why you are doing this social media grind. I know we usually have an answer that we have ready to regurgitate out. But really consider what that purpose is and do some thinking about if what you spend your time on when you are doing social media is in service of that purpose and goal or if you are slipping into being a worker for the platform. To be sure, the platform is free and they have to pay their bills somehow. Your success needs to be in a way that helps them succeed with their goal. So, yes, we need to play the game. The question is whether you are playing that game smartly and making sure your needs are being cared for as well as Instagram’s or TikTok’s or whatever your platform of choice is. A significant way to serve your purpose is to establish deeper relationships with your followers. And now is a great time to dedicate yourself to doing this because, if all you do is feed your social media platform by posting quantity, there is an AI bot looking to take your job.

So, I am going to close down the digital noise and go for a walk in the park. I find I have to do this self-evaluation on a weekly basis to make sure I am not slipping into a rut that saps my energy, but does not serve my followers. Perhaps that would be a good thing for you to schedule in right now for yourself.

This is Bill Strand signing off, and I will see you next time.