Visibility is for the Brave
If there is something I’ve learned about my time studying social media, it is that it is easy and comfortable to stay in the shadows, but stage fright even in a digital space is a real thing.
So this week, in an attempt to recruit more members for my BTS Lyrics Discussion Facebook Group, I took to other platforms to try and find my people elsewhere and invite them into my little space on the Internet.
And reader, it was difficult. It was scary. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Once you’ve defined your audience, which is a great task in itself, you must then find where they are, and then pitch your brand to them. And then do it again, and again.
It takes time. And it takes the right kind of content that is valuable to them, and ensuring you’re taking the right steps to make it as easy for your people to find you as possible (i.e. hashtags).
But for the sake of treading unknown water, I went over to Twitter, tumblr, reddit and Tik Tok to see what I could muster up. Friends…I came up short.
If you know BTS fans, you know that Twitter is their turf. The platform is saturated with K-Pop stans (superfans). So with my meager 235 followers, I still came up short. I did the necessary: pinned my tweet with a link to the group to the top of my profile, had followers retweet it. I had marginal success, but I am just a tiny user in a sea of what fans call “big accounts”.
Even though I felt like Twitter was going to be my big break and I ended up flopping, I was not deterred, so I went over to tumblr. I have over 2,000 followers on the platform so I thought surely I’ll garner some attention over there.
I was mistaken. Even though I used appropriate tags, my follower base is largely fans of another artist, so none of my consistent audience was interested and didn’t take the bait.
My engagement on the tumblr post was virtually nonexistent, so I resigned to ask for help, and my sister suggested posting something in the BTS Subreddit, as posts are typically seen quickly and the algorithm is different than that of Instagram and Facebook.
Well…I tried.
I got a notification that I had received Reddit Karma (I don’t know what that is??) so I excitedly checked my post, and then:
Turns out, the BTS subreddit is very serious about their community and discussions, and my post was taken down because there is an official Discord channel for different types of discussions, so the moderators do not allow promotion of other online communities.
As my last attempt at gaining some sort of visibility, I pulled out my last card. Inspired by one of my classmates who had incredible success recruiting for his Facebook group via Tik Tok, I decided to set my shyness aside and made my own video. I used an audio clip that I knew people who would be interested in my community use frequently.
As you can see, the Tik Tok algorithm hasn’t favored me yet, which, fair enough. Until this video I strictly was a viewer on the app, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for not favoring my very first video even though I strategically chose my tags based on what I’ve seen other similar videos to have.
As I mentioned earlier on, and ultimately what I’ve learned through my test in bravery is while there are many ways in which we can strategically increase our visibility for our brands, what I have ultimately come to find is that if you want authentic and consistent engagement as well as an audience that will advocate for your online presence, you need time to build content, relationships, and community.
