I have multiple hats in Utopian.io. I write and edit content and moderate in the Blog category. I also edit our most neglected category: Visibility, AKA Social.
This is where you create one of the following:
- Paid search engine and display ad placement
- Paid social media ad
- Post to social media accounts with at least 10,000 unique followers.
Creating a Thunderclap campaign was also an option, but they're shutting down.
You do this to promote an open source project that is on the Utopian Visibility Whitelist or for which a task requst has been made. We've got a nice variety of projects on the whitelist. Most of them are related to Steem in some way, but not all. Find one your familiar with, or research one until you feel you can promote it effectively.
We incentivize these posts with upvotes, of course. But we get very few contribution. For the past few weeks, all of the contributions to the category have come from a single user.
I would guess part of the reason people don't do this is that two of the ways require spending money upfront to earn money later through upvotes. And with the currency as low as it is, the profit margin may be very thin. And most people don't have more than 10,000 unique followers. However, if you have the chops to make an effective campaign, you may find the reward can be quite nice, even now. And if you believe in Steem's future, with the coming SMTs, the ROI you get in SP and Steem may become quite significant down the road.
Facebook and Twitter ads aren't very expensive, especially if you target a well defined audience tailored to the project you're promoting.
We want you to participate because we want to support these projects, and this is a way we can do that beyond the blockchain.
We're also here to help. We have a #marketers channel in the Utopian discord server, where we're happy to answer questions. I'm there. More importantly, Visibility category manager @techslut is there. She's the sharpest mind I know when it comes to social media advertizing.
Campaign Example
I'm going to go through the steps of creating a Facebook campaign for Steemhunt. Steemhunt is a platform for finding cool new products. They have an SMT on the way, and big plans for future uses for it. I'm going to focus on what they currently have going. I selected a budget of 100 ILS, which is $28. That's a bit high, actually, considering the current state of the currency, so you may want to go lower.
As the location for my ad, I selected some of the cities picked as the world's biggest tech hubs. SteemHunt is a tech enthusiast brand, so that made sense to me. SteemHunt is an English language site, so I picked English as the target language:
For interests and behaviours, I want a combination of two things: interest in new tech products, and an interest in cryptocurrency and/or digital currency. I picked a bunch of interests in both groups.
Finally, I created my ad. As this is an example, I went a bit lazy. The image is from a Google images search result, and the ad copy is extremely basic. But it's relevant and could be quite effective. If I was actually launching this ad, I would probably avoid an image with the word "Steem." Because I'm not promoting Steem in this one, and that's adding a new term that may confuse people. Simple is good.
The ad would currently run under my publishing house's account, which is far from ideal. Consider creating a facebook page dedicated to promotion.
Call To Action
This is my call to action, and the target is you. I want more posts to moderate in the Visibility category. I want the projects on our whitelist to have a wave of new signups that will stagger and amaze them. I know you can do this. In my months on Steem, I have seen amazing things. I have a ton of faith in this community's ability to do this. We have so many smart people, many of whom are way more savvy in the ways of marketing than I am (I'm a pure content dude, while @techslut is a marketing machine, which is why we make a good combo). You can do this. Just go to our guidelines where you'll find all the information you need.
I look forward to your contributions.