Crowdfire

Whether we like to admit it or not, social media followings continue to hold a lot clout (in every industry) because they give us a common benchmark with which to compare ourselves to our competitors.

Who you should compare yourself to, and in what capacity, is a completely different post all together...But if you're looking for some great personal development articles about how NOT to compare yourself to the wrong people, check out this recent post on The Art of Charm blog: Enjoying Success at Your Own Pace

Back to social.

There is something weird happening in the social media ecosystem. Generations are fractioning at ever-increasing rates and each new generation is differentiating and defining themselves by the social apps they're adopting and choosing to engage with. I've heard that Facebook is a 22-year-old and up platform, and from what I've experienced that seems to be a pretty legit generalization (caveat: I preach that we should never to make large sweeping generalizations). I was in High School when Facebook came out and was still exclusive to University students but because the school I went to gave us ".edu" email addresses we were able to create accounts and I'll be honest, that changed everything. I was pretty obsessed with Facebook all the way through college and it's been eye opening to meet younger kids that didn't even care about it.

The reason this is a big deal is because I've let my own passion for specific platforms affect my business decisions in the past.

I even let myself get talked OUT of using YouTube in exchange for Vimeo when I first started Only The Beat. Of course Vimeo had better video quality...but the discovery for your videos on the platform is zilch. Don't worry, not only have I learned from that mistake, I'm planning on making YouTube the center of our new strategy moving forward until we decide whether we're going to build out our own player or go for a turn key solution like Lessthan3.com is doing...but of course, the CEO of the video player they're using is also the CEO of Lessthan3...aka...he's just a really smart dude and realized that the video player he needed to create for his site could also be a turn-key product and completely separate viable business (since video is the future).

We make jokes like ROI (RADIO ON INTERNET) on TV shows like Silicon Valley...but it IS interesting that it really took so long for us to come full circle and bring video to the internet and make it front and center. We're talking about video on Facebook like it's some new insane thing when the first TV was invented in 1927, but I guess that's a testament to the complexity of serving millions of hours of video a day to billions of people all over the world.

I'm determined not to let this happen again. Instagram is another platform that I've shied away from personally, I've never been big on posting pictures (leaving evidence!), but there's no denying the power it has over Millennial's.

I'm going to make Instagram a focus of my work over the next few weeks, learn the in's and out's, figure out how to generate successful creative, and really learn to harness it as a marketing tool. The first step? Crowdfire. My friend has used it to gain over 7k followers on his company's Instagram in a month. All real, engaged followers. That was enough to convince me to spend the $20 a month to have 2 team members and manage 5 accounts.

Sitting at 1,796 followers as of 9/11/2015

I thought I'd give it a go and let you guys know how it works out. After just a few days of dinking around we've added ~100 followers with minimal effort. So I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out. Don't drink the coolaid just yet, I'll keep you guys posted.

He's also advised me to use iconosquare.com for Instagram analytics and comment management, which I will also be doing and reporting back on. The yearly subscription only runs you $28.80. I'm excited to get started.