True Fans – Even the NY Times knows about them!

In my recent Wordcamp Hamilton presentation, I talked about how to build your own fanbase to support your writing. In that presentation, I talked about Kevin Kelly’s suggestion that all you need is 1,000 True Fans to support your creative career.

A recent article on Medium.com by Lydia Polgreen, Editorial Director, NYT Global, entitled “Why people pay to read The New York Times“, mentioned the following:

We used Facebook to push stories out to potential readers, to get people to sign up for our Spanish-language newsletter, Boletín, and to drive traffic to our home page. Just as it does for so many other businesses, Facebook helped us find our true fans.

This is spot on with my talk, where I mentioned that you should use social media to drive traffic to your home page and to get people to sign up for your newsletters. Social media is a fantastic generator of eyeballs. The key is to use it to drive traffic to your site. Be wary of building audience on someone else’s turf (like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat or <insert flavour of the moment here>).

And, almost on queue, Facebook popped up today to say that they are going to change the behaviour of content delivered to people’s newsfeed on Facebook. Facebook is going to fine tune your feed so that “friends and family come first”. This means less of a focus on publisher’s content and more focus on status updates and photos and videos from your friends. (additional commentary from NYTimes here)

It’ll be interesting to see how this alters the dynamic between the Social Network and its publishing competitors/partners as they continue their courtship dance in the online world.

And, let this serve as yet another reminder to build your own home and foster community where you can control it.

That’s it. G’night!

Todd