Face(book) OFF & Steem ON!
“We are in a David and Goliath type of struggle and we are David. David won, as we all know.”-Scott Moore
In Bharatpur sanctuary in India, I found this unusual 'face-off' between two birds. A White throated Kingfisher was perched on the branch already - considering himself the King. Then came this young parrot, alighted on the same branch. The Kingfisher squawked threateningly but the parrot just stared at him and dared him to come forward. Here is the picture of that historic face off that I took with my Nikon P900. It was in January of 2015.
Looking at that face-off, I could not help thinking about the face off between the Social media giant Facebook and the brilliant young kid on the block Steemit.
Facebook has been around for 7+ years and has a huge presence worldwide. Steemit, on the other hand, is barely 1+ years old.
We, the Steemians are proud of our platform and always defend it's merits. Rightly so - however, we need to look at where we stand in comparison to Facebook so that we know how much catching up we have to do to become the number one social media platform in the world.
It is my understanding that social media platforms thrive when the platform is looked upon by the community and businesses as a positive influence in daily lives of users. Therefore, it stands to reason that the number of daily active users is a statistic that is important for gauging the potential of the platform.
Facebook daily active users report is as follows based on statistics and graphs from this site.
Compared to this, please see this graph on number of daily active users on Steemit from this report by @penguinpablo.
Many of us would like to rationalize that Facebook has been around for more number of years and hence Facebook has more daily active users. However, I do not think that this is a valid viewpoint. As we can see from the graph above, even in it's fledgling stage, Facebook had 370,000+ daily users while Steemit has around 30,000+ daily users.
This is a magnitude of difference!
So - we, the Steemians, have to focus, in my humble view, on the following:
Advertise profusely about Steemit. Only word of mouth publicity does not work in this digital age. Perhaps a % earning from each post can be taken as a sort of 'publicity tax'?
Make Steemit feel more like a peer based network. However we may hate Facebook, one thing is clear - everyone is born equal on Facebook. There are no Whales or Dolhpins and there is no hierarchy. I this respect, perhaps a newcomer may feel less daunted on Facebook compared to Steemit.
I do understand the logic and need of hierarchy based on meritocracy in a platform like Steemit but we need to take a look at other factors of the hierarchy such as the ability of high SP holders to self vote and create better hierarchical position for themselves eventually.We should promote set up of businesses with Steem blockchain. I guess the step taken by Steemit promoters to introduce a smart token architecture is a step in this direction.
In Conclusion:
Let us spread the word about Steemit - Like we mean it!!
Steemians, please comment freely to share your experiences, knowledge and views about how we can help Steemit become even a better platform so that we can, one day proudly proclaim it to be the #1 social media platform in the world.Thanks.
Note: All images except for the wildlife photos and the title image created by me are from pixabay.com.
Gif crafted by the Legendary @stellabelle for me