Who's the G.O.A.T.
When it comes to social media marketing, there is no doubt that content will always king. With social media, the users are the ones that decide if the content is worth the attention of other users. Because of this principle, your content's reach will only be as far as the content is worth. However, even when the content is valuable it can be tricky to earn exposure.
In November of last year, I created a social voting website that asked one simple question: who's the greatest rapper of all time? The problem? I needed people to vote. Below, I detail the idea that I had, the results I received, and a few lessons I've learned.
[ the IDEA ]
Inspired by the original Facebook ELO rating algorithm, I wanted to create a website to answer Hip Hop's most debated question - who is the greatest rapper of all time?
Using an open-source code I found online, I created www.whosthegoat.com. Visiting the website presents the user with two rap artists, and one simple question: who's better? Clicking either artist will respectively record the win/lost and reload with a new game for the user. The only other pages included on the website were a top ten and a bottom ten for users to view the overall ranking.
Now that the website was complete, I needed to get people who were passionate about hip hop to vote. To do so, I turned to one of the largest sub communities on Reddit, r/HipHopHeads. The subReddit that I chose boasts 200,000 subscribers and has a very active and intense community of hip hop fans. I knew that if anyone would enjoy this website, they would be found here.
[ the RESULTS ]
From the start, I never expected this website to become anything. However, I was doing it as a side project in class and was curious if it had any potential. I posted it to Reddit twice, once in November, and again in April.
THE FIRST POST
I made a post on a sub-forum of reddit, r/HipHopHeads. The immediate response that the website received was overwhelming. I posted it around 10am and around 10:30 It had a couple hundred clicks. Around 12:30pm I went to check the page after class and the my website wouldn't load. Curious, I went back to the reddit post and it had enormous response and hundreds of comments - it seemed people were enjoying it.
THE SECOND POST
So the website did really well when I first posted it, despite having a few bugs. Because the bugs were far beyond my experience to fix, I gave up on trying to move the website away from its simple beginnings. However, regardless of it's limitations there were still people who enjoyed the website. I was curious to find out if my first post was a fluke, so I decided to erase all votes and post it again in April. 258,467 votes later, my side project turned into a valuable lesson that gave me a lot of insight. Thanks to google analytics, I have superior insight to the hip-hop community that dwells on reddit. For a nerd like me - data is beautiful. Although It is debatable if I will ever put all this information to good use, it's nice to analyze.
[ the LESSONS ]
This has been a long article so I'm only briefly going discuss what I've learned from this experience. These are only a few of my thoughts, so take from this article what you will.
Reddit has amazing potential - Unlike Twitter and Facebook your content is not automatically handicapped by the number of people that follow you. Your account can have no reputation, no experience, and still be seen by thousands of people around the world.
Create content that can be discussed - Especially when posting to Reddit, your content should be something that can be discussed by the community. Similar to people sharing posts on Facebook that have a lot of interaction, The number of comments a post has will typically draw more users into the discussion. If your content sparks a friendly debate, or discussion, half the battle is over.
Reddit has a short attention span - Then again, what social media website doesn't? Similar to the lifespan of tweets, whatever the topic of discussion today is will be replaced tomorrow. Reddit is one of the largest websites on the internet with countless number of people checking it throughout the day. The 40,000 people who saw your post yesterday, don't care about it tomorrow and it will be buried behind newer posts. I was reminded of this yesterday when I made the front page of r/pics. The imgur statistics showed my image was viewed 514,000 times yesterday, but only rose to 585,741over the course of the last 24 hours.