The impact of Virality isn’t permanent. What is permanent is your value proposition!
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The one thing that social media has developed in every one of the content creators is the “need to go viral”.
In fact, the objective with content creation has become “virality”.
But is going viral the measure of success in content creation?
You are free to decide but the truth is that it isn’t!
There is this creator that I have been following for some time.
He is a social media content creator and since I still consider myself as an under-graduate in social media and since his content was extremely good and educational, I followed him to learn social media.
He had about 8,000 odd followers and he had been creating for more than a year.
Then one day he put out a piece of content. It was good. In fact, it was real good.
The post suddenly went viral.
There were almost a million views on the content.
If virality were to be considered as the measure of success, then this post and this creator was a huge success.
What did this viral post do? What was the impact?
For somebody who isn’t a content creator and has been following him, he was an overnight success. A story that every content creator starting on the web would want to be a part of.
The creator went from 8,000 followers to 104K followers in under 7 days.
But for me, who has been in the content creation business, there were multiple aspects that were downsides –
The creator wanted to replicate the phenomenon. So he started creating content that was similar and replicated one or, multiple things from the original post.
The result – content that didn’t really resonate with an audience like me who started ignoring them
While the numbers said a different story, a little bit of analysis of the numbers had something else to say.
The engagement on the newer content should ideally have gone up drastically if not proportionately. But it didn’t.
In fact, while it fell as a percentage, the absolute numbers showed that it was at the same levels are earlier.
This meant that the newer followers weren’t active or, didn’t engage with the content.
Initially people felt that the creator had purchased followers and asked him questions around it.
Later, people started trying to emulate him with the hope that their content too would go viral which obviously wasn’t happening.
His follower count first stayed stagnant at the same 104K for a few weeks and then it started decreasing.
Maybe, the people who followed him for that viral piece of content, started unfollowing him or, it was also possible that because of the kind of content he was creating after his post went viral, his initial followers started unfollowing him.
When I weigh the positives and the negatives of the impact that this one viral post created, the weighing scale is a little too tilted towards the negative sides.
Aside of the fact that such virality is destroying the good content creators, it is also giving rise to a bunch of creators who start off with the sheer hope of going viral and would then quit when it doesn’t happen in the first few weeks.
The result – diluted, muddy and dirty waters, where the good content gets lost and is difficult to find.
Virality can make you a sensation but only for the night you go viral. Most such viral stories fade off in a few months.
So, don’t aim at virality!
What is more important is your value proposition. What is the value you are able to provide with your content?
If you can stay true to that value proposition, your fame will last for long. Though the chances of you becoming an overnight sensation is low, you will stay in people’s mind for long.
It’s a choice you need to make – long term Vs short-term.
This tweet about how I went from earning $2K per month to ZERO was much liked by a lot of people.
If you don’t want to repeat the same mistakes that I made, then you might want to check it out here.
News You Would be Interested in:
Buzzsprout launched Buzzsprout ads a couple of months back. They have now reported that independent producers have earned more than $100,000 in only the first 2 months of launching Buzzsprout ads. That’s some good news for creators.
The podcast “The Diary of the CEO with Steven Bartlett” and the meal replacement brand Huel entered into legal trouble over a sponsored ad played on the podcast. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint made against them stating that, a host-read podcast ad was not identified as an ad, and that it was “in a similar style and tone to the editorial material and therefore not differing significantly between the two. That’s a word of caution for podcast creators who don’t use the ad disclosure correctly.
You will like these links:
If you are looking at using dynamic ad insertion for your podcast, then this is a good article worth reading.
This article on User generated content strategy is worth the read if UGC is something you focus on in your content strategy.
Questions from the reader
This was a question sent to me by one of my Instagram Followers –
What do you recommend – Manual Transcription or, Automated transcription?
I recommend adding a transcript to your episode for 2 reasons – firstly it helps the hearing impaired and secondly it helps in SEO.
If you look at the reasons why I recommend a transcript, helping the hearing impaired would need manual transciption but for SEO, you could go with an automated transcription.
Having said that, these days the automated transcription is extremely accurate and hence more and more people are preferring automated transcription. It is cheaper too.
So, my recommendation is to go with automated transcription but do pick a good service like Descript or, you could even use the online version of MS-Word, if you have Microsoft 365.
Don’t delay acting on a good idea. Chances are someone else has just thought of it, too. Success comes to the one who acts first.” H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Recommended Reading
The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness – This book by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (Author) helps you declutter your mind and live a free life. This is an excellent read if you think you are burdened and stressed.
The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness – This book by Eric Jorgenson is a recommendation from a lot many successful people. This is a collection of all of the wisdom from Naval Ravikant who is an entrepreneur, philosopher and investor. This book show you how to be wealthy and happy, two things that very rarely go together.
Note – Some of these are affiliate links and I might earn a commission if you choose to purchase using these links, but that would be at no extra cost to you.
That’s it for this week,
See ya again in the next edition,
Dilip K
P.S. If you would like to connect with me or, read more of my writings in the form of blog posts, then you can visit my blog about Podcasting Tips.
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