What a week it's been. New country, new culture, new food, it's been a lot. And while all that's been happening, I've been trying (some wins, some fails), to establish the skillset needed to begin generating recurring revenue from technical products a'la solopreneur style. There has also been a stark lesson: distribution is king. This will be a short episode, but lets get into it...
If you've been following along so far you'll know I've recently been doing a bit of a social media push, with an X account and a Threads account . It's been mixed results so far, and by following the flavour-of-the-month in terms of posting frequency and content I've managed to grow from a standing start to a staggering 22 followers on X, and 75 followers on Threads, and even had a real-life meetup with someone from Threads (and didn't get murdered, double win!) .
This level of reasonably slow growth is expected, especially as I'm completely new to both platforms and don't have premium/priority subscriptions (yet) to either. That said, being in this tadpole stage of social media existence has got me drawing parallels with cooking. I promise this will be relevant...
Imagine you're running a banh mi stand off the back of a moped (these exist, there are lots of them here). You can park it somewhere with a megaphone announcing your presence, and get a maximum of say 10 of the 200 nearby people interested in buying one. If however you drive your moped around the city, blasting your pitch at everyone then you might pollute say 3000 people's ears with your ads, and maybe fewer as a percentage will bite, but still you might end up with say 50 sales.
Having been a social media enjoyer for the past 12 days, I see a perfect parallel with large and small accounts, and fixed vs travelling salesmen. What's more, even if the stationary salesman's product is exceptionally good, it doesn't matter for the bottom line since the travelling salesman's distribution is just better. So what does this mean for me, and for you as someone who might be interested in doing this sort of thing? Distribution is king. If nobody knows who you are or what you're doing, none of it matters at all.
This is a double edged sword, on one hand it's a bit depressing because it means that you essentially have to engage with social media platforms (and in a way that their algorithms will amplify), but it's also true that there is essentially no barrier to entry. There are many examples of slow rises to popularity, faster viral growth, and everything inbetween.
If like me you've lived your life completely oblivious to the different ways of posting, things (content) to post, and everything else around social media, then the term content strategy will seem a bit foreign. In simple terms, it's just what you plan on posting, when you plan on doing it, and some other details like how you will engage with other's posts, and who you will engage with. As someone who enjoys growing plants, I again see parallels. Growing plants is a science; nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, water, and sunlight, and almost all plants will grow. Growing social media accounts feels similar; posts, replies, clickbait, headshots, and most platform's algorithms will begin to favour your content and distribute it more widely amongst their users.
The question then is; what should my content strategy be? I honestly have no idea, but I'm building one as we speak, and have some analytics tools set up to better understand what works and doesn't work for the things I'm posting, so it should be an interesting mini-case-study and one whose results will be directly applicable to you.
Anyway, a short one this week as I've been super jet-lagged and still recovering, but looking forward to next week where I'll be more settled, and will hopefully be able to give you some easy ways to grow your online presence without selling your soul and running a political clickbait page. See you there!
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
Previous Episode: An Introduction To Solopreneurship