The Baader Meinhof phenomenon (or the frequency illusion as it's also known) is one we are all familiar with even if you've never heard of it before. If you haven't, be prepared to hear about it again and again as if by wild coincidence. Because that's what it does. Often you hear about something or see something once or twice or three times before you take any notice. But after the third time this something has become familiar before you even realised.

Have you ever had a strange day or week where after seeing something new you suddenly kept seeing it everywhere? It might not be new to you at all, but after the third time, it's no coincidence that you begin to see it everywhere. That's what the frequency illusion does. Selective attention prevents us from noticing things that are less familiar. We subconsciously choose to notice things that we've seen before. As creatures that are addicted to patterns, when we begin to notice what we've seen before we are prone to confirmation bias, which means we convince ourselves it's everywhere.

The Baader Meinhof phenomenon (or frequency illusion) is taken advantage of in the marketing world. When a new blockbuster movie comes out, you see the screening adverts not just at the cinema, but also on the TV and on the buses and soon after that your friends are all talking about it and the clothing industry are even selling merchandise for the film. The same thing goes for the marketing of any product or service. That's why we have product placement. It isn't always necessary to pitch why you should buy coca cola in the movie. Just seeing it 3 times in 3 different places is enough to compel you to think about it.

How many advertising spaces does steemit have?

You are one of thousands of users of steemit who most likely use all sorts of other social media.

What do we need to do to plant the seed of steemit into people's minds?

The answer is simple. So you told your friends about steemit already and not all of them bought the idea. You share your articles on Facebook but they are likely being shadow banned.

It takes just 3 sightings to notice

Here's what I'm doing to pull in new users and I encourage you to do the same or something of the same effect if you want to bring people to steemit and make our community stronger. We have thousands of users. Together, without pushing or trying to convince people with our words, we can plant steemit in the minds of other social media users.

I'm using the photos above for my phone messenger apps (Thank you @jsantana for making them for me). I also shared a bunch of steemfest photos on Facebook which have gotten a lot of attention. I also shared a vlog about steemfest last weekend.


And of course there's the steem film! Sharing these things one day at a time, resulted in a few private messages and I now have a few friends who are scoping out the website, thinking about what to write for their very first post.

Native speakers only.

Google translate not permitted.