Blockchain marketing helps brands and start-ups reach and mobilize an army of micro-influencers through the automated influencer campaign feature. The result: your content on social networks gets a new chance for organic reach.
Sether plans to revive organic reach by connecting brands with users. On Sether, brands will incentivise people to help spread the word about them instead of investing in social media advertising platforms. Ad budgets will be split between influencers, according to their effort and reach.
Organic reach is the term used to define how many people you can reach for free on a social network. On Facebook, for example, it’s how many fans of your brand Page could your content reach without spending money on boosts. This feature was launched in 2007: anyone could create a fan page for their brands and assume the community gathered there would see all the messages posted there.
But organic reach on social media is declining. Facebook justifies it by invocating the immense amount of content that cannot be shown simultaneously to subscribers. With the help of its algorithms and AI, it’s trying to show people the posts that are most relevant to them, instead of every post that’s available.
Research from Social@Ogilvy shows a steady drop in Facebook organic reach. In 2012 it was restricted to 16%, further declining up to 6% on February 2014, and the prediction is that it will get to 0 anytime soon. This lead to the situation where brands have to boost posts and create Facebook Ad campaigns to gain followers, reach and engagement.
Average brand post engagement also declined by 20% in 2017, Buzzsumo reports, plunging from 340 to 264 over the first six months of the year. In this context Facebook is getting close to a paid ad platform. There won’t be any other way to reach your fans than by giving money to the platform.
As for Twitter, in 2014, it estimated that with a consistent tweeting strategy, marketers could reach 30% of their followers, for free. That’s down to 3.61% in 2016, according to Hootsuite.
Since organic reach on social media is so low, and you as a brand have to dig inside your pockets, influencer marketing became bigger and stronger. Why give money to media platforms for targeting when you could pay people to share stuff about you with their friends? Or why pay to display one image when you could have an influencer do a whole video about your new product, one that could better answer your customer’s questions? Influencer campaigns are used to harness the power of the community: brands employ influencers to help them gain awareness.
The result of these campaigns call for a new name, as the reach is not quite organic, because you do pay for it, and it’s not paid reach either, because the content does not appear as ads or sponsored content. Because it’s posted by your supporters, your content will be seamlessly weaved inside social media’s feeds and not stand out like sponsored posts do.
Brands quickly found a way around the declining organic reach. They pay good money to media platforms for awareness and then some more money to influencers, for engagement.
With budgets that are too small for top influencers, start-ups have the option of manually searching for micro-influencers. They then have to gain their support and strike a deal to gain access to their audience. The process is time consuming and not always fruitful.
Blockchain start-ups use a similar strategy to promote their Initial Coin Offering, to maximize their chances of getting funded. Bounty campaigns – as they are called in crypto slang – allow start-ups to motivate the people who believe in them for promotional, translation and bug hunting work. At the end of the ICO sale, a certain part of the raised money will go to the participants in bounty campaigns, also called bounty hunters.
While simple and efficient in theory, bounty campaigns can quickly complicate the life of their creators and participants, because of the way they are managed. The common way of doing things is through an excel sheet, where participants leave proof of the tasks they did. But they have to apply to the campaign first, by filling forms. Few start-ups talk about the slow process of manually registering participants, allocating points of participation and repaying them in crypto at the end of the campaign. When people join by the hundreds, it can get overwhelming even for big teams. Many get a campaign manager to do the work for them, but that doesn’t rule out human error.
We can track the activity of thousands of different types of influencers on multiple social media platforms. We’ll also automatically keep tabs on their posts and allocate them points according to results. A campaign manager can, therefore, control and motivate large crowds of influencers in no time, by automating task check-up and participant verification through smart contracts.
Sether wants to democratize organic reach, making it accessible to companies of all sizes. We’re seeing this as a “fight fire with fire situation”, where you fight the algorithm that buries your posts with the power of the people, blockchain, AI and analytics.
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