This article debunks the idea that in today’s (2017) social media, anybody online can hear your voice and you start up anything online by the help of the social media.
In theory, everything seems to be great. You have amazing tools called “social media”, which is predominantly led by Facebook and Twitter (and their sub products like Instagram or Periscope) and where almost everyone who is already online is already clustered, so all you have to do is publish whatever you think you do best and everyone will hear you clear and loud. Well, have you actually tried to do that during the last 7 years or so? How well did you do? Did you start to get people’s attention after a few posts and it grew exponentially as it should be? Or you ended up paying for ads on each and every step of your online business, just to make your voice heard among all that “crowd”.
If your answer is the first one, I must say you are extremely lucky, you should go for the lottery! If the second one though, make sure you are not alone! There are probably millions of people who has encountered the same thing but interpreted the results as lack of experience or lack of funds for advertisement (which means that they accept to pay in first place) or simply their idea wasn’t that brilliant enough.
Let me tell you something, the reason of your failure was none of those! I don’t even know anything about your idea or how hard you tried. However, what I know is, after 2009 or so, the social media was transformed in such a thing that only the ones who had enough capital or enough reputation could be heard and we have been living in such a social media ever since!
At the very beginning of the social media, which was roughly 2006 or 2007 (you could even date it back to the beginning of the Internet but here I am going to consider the years when Facebook and Twitter started to get popular worldwide), it was exactly like how you also assumed when you started your online business idea, one had some good idea and unlike what you think, it didn’t have to be that brilliant, being heard was not an issue at all, you just had to post it and probably “hashtag” it and that was it. Anybody who was interested in similar things would find you without hassle and you could actually start an online business and even grow it online without even paying a penny!
You might say, “well back then the competition was low too! So you had more chance to stand out.” Yes it is true but only partially. If your idea was something too broad, you would get high competition back then as well. Furthermore, today you actually get much more people online than 10 years ago, so the number of potential customers have also increased dramatically. Therefore, this is neither a reason nor an excuse. The real thing is, back then, if you failed, you could actually make sure that your idea sucked. However, today, even if you have a brilliant idea, you have to work for its advertisement really hard and in most of the cases you have to pay thousands of dollars at least and all those would only show you whether your idea is actually that good or not. The “smart” algorithms have been preventing your potential customers/audience from seeing your posts in the top results since roughly 2009 (and as you also know almost nobody checks what’s below the top results), in order to make you pay for advertising.
Today, even to reach out to your own audience, which you built by yourself, you have to pay (e.g. boosting a post on Facebook). Therefore, today, the alleged “free social media” thing is long over. Today’s social media is purely ads-oriented.
Probably you have heard a few stories even up to today in which a few individuals started from scratch and built and online treasure but let me ask you this: how many do you know of such and how many people have been trying? These are just deliberately crafted stories to keep the potential “ads spenders” on hook with false hope. If the original social media hadn’t been “killed” on purpose, those stories would be part of daily life today. If it is hard to believe for you due to fact that you believe that there is such potential out there to make every single startup rich, think again because there is! It is just in today’s social media, all this richness is canalized to a few online conglomerates, which is designed on purpose, that’s why you get the impression that “it would be impossible to get all these millions of people with new ideas some decent money anyway”, basically you don’t even see that money. The money that’s played out there is huge, billions of dollars in worst year! Usually way above that and counting up every year...
In short, The free social media, the social media which enabled everyone to reach to everyone for free, which is in coherence with the actual idea of the Internet, died in 2009 and today’s social media is just making use of the fame of that original social media left behind, just to make the ones who already have enough capital even richer.
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