Fractional Social Media
When it comes to content creation and subsequent monetization, the conventional wisdom is to form a tribe of individuals with the same interest and build an audience from there. What if your interests are varied?
1. Make Your Online Brand About a Narrow Interest/Theme
Ignore the rest
2. Make Accounts For Each Theme/Interest
Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X/Twitter. That many accounts (along with passwords and handles/IDs for each) could be a management nightmare
3. YouTube Has Channels
I believe a single account can have multiple channels - each interest could occupy its own channel. Video, however, is a pretty time-consuming media to create content for.
4. A Social Media Network That Has Channels
Subscribe to your Uncle Bob's Fantasy Football content, not his political views.
5. Channels are identified not only by subject, but by media type
If you don't like reading, subscribe to audio and video only. Or if you don't want to use up data, no video content.
6. The Platform Provides Tools To Automate and Cross Post
In theory, you could record a video in front of a camera, vlog style, and it could go to audio (podcast) and transcribe to text too. AI could potentially clean up any awkward wording and umms and uhs into better prose
7. As you divide up your own content into channels, so you have different groupings for the content you subscribe to.
Lists exist on a lot of platforms but as far as I know, they aren't widely used, so maybe there is some room for improvement there.
8. Provide Analytics
You should be able to have a graphical representation of which of your channels you post content to more often, which get more engagement (again by subject and/or by media). I think many of us would like to know what our read/write (or produce vs. consume) ratios are.
9. Fuzzy Curation
I can recall for a brief moment, where Facebook offered a slider where you could adjust how much you see of a profile's posts. It didn't last long, but I loved the idea of being able to simply see a little less of some people's posts (and perhaps more of others) without being a black/white muting.
10. Conclusions
We know social media platforms are there to make money for themselves by monetizing their users' data, so this feature list might not be compelling from a business case point-of-view - it's very user-centric and about the user's convenience. Still, the early days of social media were full of excitement, and subscribers were gained by providing a fun and interesting user experience, rather than an algorithm shoving mental illness down their throats.
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