Dear creative, are you being heard?

I feel like it's safe to automatically assume that everyone reading this is creative to some extent. I've seen some really creative work on social media and Steemit is no exception yet in many cases it isn't seen. Sure we can break it down and blame it on other users, the platform itself or some sort of force that doesn't want the little guy to succeed. I feel like we blame external factors for failed marketing and forget about we can do to improve reach and engagement. For a bunch of creative content creators, we aren't great when it comes to marketing creatively.

The current formula for moving content around the net is by posting in the hopes that everyone is going to love it and repost it for you. This "hope marketing" would create virality and then BOOM! Fame. I'm not sure of the stats, but this almost never happens. I'm willing to put my money on round about a 2% success rate with this provided your content is good, the time is right and the stars are in decent alignment.

We've seen the rise of accounts offering synthetic virality through influencers and this has made things even more complex. I've had an experience with a certain company based in South Africa that has a massive database of influencers (people they deem fit through checking social media presence) that can be called upon to make something trend for a short period of time. I know they aren't the only one. I've often wondered what something like that would cost, but I know that it wouldn't be cheap to initiate a campaign.

I've amassed social media tips over the years that serve as a guide for me while posting content. I will admit that although I've never had anything go viral, I have managed to build up small communities of followers on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp (i know, right) and Twitter. Some of these tips include;

Posting consistently (whether daily or weekly)
Posting at similar times (to build a healthy amount of anticipation)
Remodeling content for different platforms over just posting the same thing across the board
Spending time in the comment section so that readers feel connected to the poster
Cross promotion of one social media platform in the signature of a post on a different platform.

While these tips won't make you go viral, they are a nice base to have to at least build a decent following over time. Mix this with really emotion-provoking, button-pushing content and a whole lot of fortune will probably be your best bet for organic virality. Beyond this I'd advise looking up products/accounts that went viral in the past and studying how they achieved this. A lot of the campaigns required existing attention/influence/leverage or a large budget, but some campaigns latched onto another source of leverage for free and used that to propel themselves toward virality.

To sum it all up I'd say that virality isn't necessarily a goal but a culmination of a bunch of factors that most creatives have no control over. We shouldn't expect something to catch social media traction based on a hope especially when the idea has been done before. Your product might be the best of its kind, but what are you doing to ensure that you're heard?

SB