This week, I want to talk about the importance of taking advantage of new social media platforms while they are still new. If you wait until a platform is popular or until you understand everything about how it works before deciding to try it out, then you’re hurting your chances of success. As soon as you start hearing some buzz about a new social media platform, you should get on it quickly. Set up a profile for your business, save your password, and then pay attention to how it progresses. This is important for a few key reasons.
Taking Advantage of New Social Media Platforms
- Get in early to claim your username. There are few things worse than waiting too long to claim a username for your business on a new platform. Once more businesses start using the platform, someone will snatch up your business name, and you'll have to come up with something less than ideal. This can be confusing for your audience.
- When a platform is new, anyone posting content is going to reach more people. Once the platform matures, and more users are posting more content, the platform starts to change its algorithm. It becomes choosier about which content is shown to users. If you start on a platform too late, you’re less likely to have as many people seeing your content than if you had gotten a much earlier start.
- Sign up, even if you don’t see how the new platform can be helpful to your business. You may not see the value in a new platform right away, but you need to stay open to its possibilities. Few really saw the value in using Facebook or Instagram, at first. The same is true for YouTube. Many successful YouTubers were just regular people who started making and uploading videos at the very beginning of the platform. They didn't completely understand what they were doing or how it would help them in the long run, but some of them became wildly successful because they got in there and just did it. Taking advantage of a new platform can be an awesome opportunity for your business. You can make your mark by doing something that everybody else isn’t already doing. You could blaze the trail and become one of those wild success stories.
- At the beginning of a platform’s existence, the perks are usually free. They're trying to get people to become a part of the platform and start using it more and more. Then, as its popularity grows, you have to start paying for your content to be seen, just as businesses have to pay to reach people on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Over time, charging for exposure becomes how the platform supports itself. Therefore, it’s best to get in as soon as possible while it’s still fresh and new so that your content can reach more people for free.
Blaze a new trail with TikTok!
My motivation for this week’s topic is the impressive growth of TikTok, a relatively new social media video platform. TikTok is currently the world's fastest-growing social media platform. It has the fourth largest user base in the world behind Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram (click this link to see a really cool chart depicting this statistic). It's already become stronger than Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and a number of other platforms. TikTok is growing extremely rapidly, and guess what? It's not just for youth. Within moments of downloading the app and setting up my own account, I was viewing videos geared toward my own "#oldpeopleontiktok" interests. Some of the videos I’ve seen have hardly any likes, comments, or shares. This means that new content from people who have no followers is being shown to users! For now, you are at an advantage because this greatly increases the odds of your content being seen by TikTok users and your followers to start growing rapidly! So jump in there and see what you can do with TikTok. Set up an account today and start posting fun, interesting content about your business. Get in while it’s still free and before it becomes another saturated marketing platform!
You can...do it!
Elizabeth Collins
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson