When I started my journey of writer/blogger on the platform Medium, I thought that my posts will reach every single connected person in the world as soon as I clicked on the submit button. Well, I found out the hard way that it is not how it works. My naive vision of online content posting took a hit. Since then, I did my homework and decided to share my experience with y'all. As the HIVE community is growing, it is important to keep spreading the word out there.

I compiled below a non-exhaustive list of social media platforms to post and promote content with the idea that it will help newbies to navigate the foggy waters of self-promotion.

7 Social Media Platforms to Consider

The first places to look at in order to create audiences are social media platforms. Today, the world is interconnected. People from all over the world talk to each other and stay informed via the use of social media apps. Today, if you want to make a difference, social media platforms are unavoidable. The number of monthly active users speaks by itself. Those numbers are from publicly available data and they are mentioned in between parenthesis. It represents your potential outreach as of April 2020.

1. Facebook

(2.498 billion monthly active users)
Facebook is the most utilized social media. Billions of people are connecting every day. It is therefore a great place to promote our content. Facebook gives you the capability to create your own page alongside your personal profile. This is a useful feature if want to deal with it separately. Importantly, Facebook offers the possibility to create groups. It is equivalent to a forum where you can post your content and engage with members that fundamentally share your interest. For instance, here is the Hive Blockchain Community Group on Facebook. Feel free to join and support the other members. The more support you give, the more support you'll get ;)

2. Youtube

(2 billion monthly active users)
YouTube was a big surprise to me. I would have never thought that you could promote writings on a social media platform specialized in the video. You can and it is even recommended based on the potential outreach it can generate. The general concept is to create a minute-long video based on your post. You can film yourself talking to the camera or you can make a slideshow highlighting the main points. Indeed, the first has more impact on your audience since they actually put a face on the words.

3. Instagram

(1 billion monthly active users)
Instagram is the social media platform where photography worths a thousand words. Owned by Facebook, Instagram is a go-to platform for branding. You can use your personal account or create a new account just for your blog. Similarly to YouTube videos, the idea here is to create an image that describes your post. It could be a title or a quote that you found representative of your work, et voila, you are ready to post on Instagram. Indeed, for your content to be seen by others you need to build a network of followers. Engage, engage, and engage with them.

4. Reddit

(430 million monthly active users)
Reddit is different than the social media described above. It is a forum more than anything else. A fantastic place to comment and ask questions. It can be a priceless tool in the longterm run. You will first need to be accepted by the community in order for them to not consider you as a spammer. People will find interest in you only if you are sincerely interested in them. The Hive community has a group of discussion called AskHive.

5. Twitter

(386 million monthly active users)
Twitter is a powerful platform to express yourself but also to promote your work. What I really like about it is you have to keep your message within 250 characters. It pushes to be concise and to go directly to the essence of your say. Grow your audience first. Engage with other members. Seek trending hashtags and add them to your tweets - #hive or #posh would be appropriate since @acidyo is working on a project that will reward tweets, likes, retweets and mentions related to the Hive community. In any case, the more interactions, the faster you'll be able to build your audience.

6. Pinterest

(366 million monthly active users)
Pinterest is a different beast. It focuses on cards with beautiful pictures. Lots of DIY tutorials in there but many bloggers are also promoting their work. Interestingly, the shelf life of a post on Pinterest in about 2 months. Not sure how they manage to do that but in fine, your posts won't be buried in the mass right away which is a big advantage compared to Twitter where the shelf life can be counted in minutes (See illustration below).

7. LinkedIn

(Undisclosed Numbers)
LinkedIn is considered a professional platform. Members built a network-based upon their skills and also based on the added professional value of your profile. LinkedIn Members seek to connect with other members that will their company. By establishing a profile on LinkedIn, you considerably increase your chance to get a gig related to your competences. In a similar fashion to the previously described social media platforms, Interacting with other members is crucial. Post interesting articles, offer your educated opinion, and re-post articles from other profiles will help you to build a network, therefore your audience.

Search Engines

Another important point to have your content viewed by many is to seriously think about how it can be found. Search engines are at the essence of this purpose. Besides advertisement, the only other way to make your content visible for many users is to make it searchable. Search engines are diverse. The most famous is Google, indeed. However, alternatives such as Duckduckgo, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu are taking part in the market as well. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial. People ask questions and the search engine looks for answers all over the world wide web. It will look for words from the question and words from the answer and score them. If they match, the search engine will display the answers in order of their score. It is a simplistic view of the mechanism behind the search engines, but it emphasized the idea of having keywords or key sentences in your posts.

Key Points & Take Away Message

• Increase your online visibility but using multiple social media platforms.
• Engage with members to build your audience.
• Generate quality content.
• Be patient, Paris has not been built in one day :)

I'd like to wrap up this post by saying that there are no miraculous solutions. Going viral is mainly reserve to very few lucky individuals. So don't get your expectations too high but keep working on quality content and who knows, one day, it might be you.