The Difficulty of Starting Out
Over the past decade, the success of many on platform such as YouTube and Instagram has led to many attempting to find their own success on these platforms with the goal of establishing a career through creating content for these platforms. However, with more and more people and brands looking for success on these platforms the overall saturation of content has meant standing out has become a real strategy that requires succinct and deliberate actions, something that is very difficult to do when establishing a brand.
For every YouTuber and Instaceleb there are even more who have created good content that has simply gone unseen, whether through lack of competent digital marketing, brand awareness or simply the YouTube algorithm. The surplus of content furthers to muddy the water with more and more quality videos and content being hidden behind random videos with clever tags or titles that take advantage of the YouTube algorithm or mainstream content that has been repackaged for the profits that YouTube brings, such as talk show snippets and music videos (replayscience.com).
In the YouTube documentary Please Subscribe successful YouTubers Grace Helbig, Joe Penna and Hannah Hart discuss how starting out was a long process with success taking years of successful posting to gain any attention on the platform, with even successful web series High Maintenance only achieving mediocre success on Vimeo before being picked up by HBO, demonstrating how hard it can be to be seen through the clutter even when you are creating quality content.
This has become the most prominent issue when developing content for The Issue when there simply isn’t an audience to share that content with, something every social media blogger or creator has experienced at some point, after all everyone starts out at zero. As a current news and affair brand the acceptance that most first YouTube videos gain less than fifty views is a bitter pill to swallow, particularly when considering that even if latter success is achieved to video will be irrelevant by that point. However, being able to counter this has become The Issues biggest challenge and key to success.
By promoting The Issue through other social media platforms with the same tactics that have seen other brands grow in popularity the chances of gaining some kind of audience prior to the video’s launch is greatly increased (Hyder, 2016). By building an audience through social media platforms with extra content that also targets our key demographic the video greatly increases its likelihood of actually being seen when first released and hopefully gain more traction than what releasing a lone video with no promotion would.
While starting out on any social media platform with the goal of achieving some kind of commercial success can be daunting and in most cases impossible, by correctly promoting the brand and building an audience The Issue at least gives itself every chance to break through the saturation and at least be seen.
-Dylan Hartnett
References
Hook, S. (2017). How Does the YouTube Algorithm Work?. [online] Replay Science. Available at: http://www.replayscience.com/blog/how-does-the-youtube-algorithm-work/ [Accessed 12 Apr. 2017].
Hyder, S., 2016. The Zen of social media marketing: an easier way to build credibility, generate buzz, and increase revenue. BenBella Books, Inc..