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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Begins Charging Users to Tweet, NICKMERCS’ Massive Kick Deal, B2B Marketing Growth Slows

Happy Fall, y’all! We are just 8 days from Halloween and this is my favorite time of the year! The days are warm but crisp and the nights are cool but not yet cold. Here’s some business stories that have caught my eye over the last week:

 

It just feels like the long. slow march toward irrelevance is underway for Twitter/X. Elon seems determined to turn X into a pay to play platform. Since taking over, he’s been introducing numerous ways to charge users for services that were formerly free.  First there was Twitter Blue. Now, he’s begun hinting that users will eventually have to pay to tweet. In fact, such a program is currently being trialed in select countries. New users in New Zealand and the Philippines are being charged $1 a year to tweet. The name of the program is called ‘Not a Bot’ and Elon’s spin is that this will help fight the proliferation of bots on the platform.  The same justification he gave for Twitter Blue, limiting daily tweets, etc. The reality is, bots are just as big of a problem as they ever were.  This is about Elon introducing the idea of paying for Twitter. It’s incrementalism, once the idea has become accepted that core services now will cost something, then he can over time raise the price as much as he wants. I may have more thoughts on this tomorrow, I want to mull this over, but it seems like Twitter is entering that long, slow death spiral.

 

If you’ve read this blog for the last few years, you know I am a big fan of NICKMERCS. He just signed a $10 Million, one year deal with Kick, a Twitch rival. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this deal is that it’s apparently NOT exclusive! Nick will still be streaming on both Twitch AND Kick. Nick is one of the most popular streamers in the world, and he is a masterclass in building and leveraging a community. Nick started streaming in 2010, with an audience of zero. On one of his streams I watched, he mentioned that when he was first starting he would go to a local gas station and buy $20 Amazon gift cards to give away to subscribers during his stream. And his parents were NOT happy with his initial decision to become a full-time streamer. So he went from zero to being one of the wealthiest streamers on the planet, in under 15 years. And a big part of that was due to him creating and SUPPORTING his community of fans. He has given away hundreds of thousands of dollars (maybe more?) to his fans over the years. He loves the people that love him.  Well done, Nick, now how long before that first Nick/Doc/Timmy stream???

 

The economy is hitting B2B Marketing spending as it is all areas of our lives right now. Projected spending on B2B marketing data in 2023 will be almost half what it was the last two years. Spending growth is forecast to see a marginal improvement in 2024, before increasing solidly in 2025.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have an amazing week, look for a new post tomorrow and another on Thursday. Oh and likely a post on the Bible over the weekend. Have a wonderful and productive week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: B2C Dominates Social, Clubhouse and Twitter Add Key New Features

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is ready to have an amazing week. Here’s a few marketing and digital stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

According to eMarketer, all of the Top 10 categories of businesses that generate social media activity are B2C businesses. The top category, Apparel and Accessories, commanded over half the social activity, more than the rest of the Top 10 combined! This isn’t that surprising when you consider that B2C businesses have far more customers that are creating content and engaging with these businesses, than B2Bs do. Still, it’s interesting to see which categories are generating the chatter.

 

Very interesting new features coming to Clubhouse, revolving around letting users and room owners share audio clips of the content created in rooms. This will greatly help discovery and promotion for room creators. Twitch streamers have been doing this for years.  The most popular ones will do a stream, then go through the hours of content they just created, and pull out the ‘highlights’ and then repost them as shorter videos for YouTube. Which they then monetize as well. Most of the bigger Twitch streamers have hired people to edit and produce their shorter ‘highlight’ videos, so I could see room creators on Clubhouse making similar moves.

 

Are we noticing that all social media is beginning to slowly blur together?  Twitter is now offering profiles for businesses. This is also aimed at ‘creators’ who want to offer newsletters and monetize their Twitter usage. This continues a sincere push by social media platforms to lock down popular and high profile users onto just their category.

 

So that’s it for this week, I hope you are enjoying the cooler Fall weather as much as I am! A quick thought: If you deal with an upset customer this week, just remember that 90% of their frustration comes from the fact that they don’t feel ‘heard’. If you communicate to them that you hear them, and have sympathy for their feelings, you are more than halfway home to handling their issue. Just remember that everyone is going through something, and we all want to be heard.

See you next Monday!

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Brands With Happy Customers Have One Thing in Common

They value their customers and communicate this through their actions.

When I talk to companies and clients and how to create passionate customers that love your brand, I typically talk about how rock stars have fans or how sports teams have fans. I talk to companies about how much of an impact it would make to their business to have customers that loved them and who were actual fans of their brand.

Almost always, the company will push back. “We aren’t Taylor Swift! We aren’t the Alabama Crimson Tide! We sell boring widgets, we aren’t rock stars and never will be!”

Rock stars don’t have fans because they are rock stars. They have fans because they put in the work to cultivate fans. Rock stars understand that they can create fans by engaging with their customers and communicating to their customers that they appreciate them, and love them.

Your company can and SHOULD be doing the very same thing. Here’s a couple of examples I have come across recently to give you inspiration:

Lego’s wonderful letters to customers

Lego has a long history of sending compassionate, humorous and thoughtful letters to customers who contact them with questions, praises and complaints. Often, these personal responses are to children who have perhaps lost a lego toy or have a question about one.

Here’s a recent example:

In this example, a customer named John bought a $350 Lego Star Wars set from Target. The set is apparently fairly hard to find. He took the set home and began assembling it. Toward the end of the process, he discovered that a bag of pieces he needed to finish the set was missing! He didn’t really have the option of returning it to Target, since he had already started assembling it, and since the store likely wouldn’t have a replacement in stock anyway.

So he contacted Lego directly.  Here was Lego’s response:

Dear John,
Thanks for getting in touch with us and providing that information! I am so sorry that you are missing bag 14 from your Mos Eisley Cantina! This must be the work of Lord Vader.

Fear not, for I have hired Han to get that bag right out to you.

Have a bricktastic day and may the force be with you.

 

The response is compassionate, humorous, and above all communicates to the customer that they heard them. It then tells them what will happen next to resolve the issue.  Perfect!

Not only will this delight John and give him a reason to buy more Lego sets, but it’s also a big source of positive PR for Lego. If you do a simple search on Google or Twitter you can easily find many mentions of Lego sending similar delightful letters to customers. All of these stories enhance the Lego brand and give more people a reason to buy from Lego.

 

The massive BBQ one streamer is holding for his Twitch subscribers

I’ve talked before about the amazing job streamer/content creator NickMercs does in creating and cultivating his community of Twitch subscribers, called MFAM. Nick is very loyal to his followers and goes out of his way to communicate this to them. Often, when he adds new brand sponsors, part of the deal will be that the brand has to give money or prizes to his subscribers. On a recent stream, he claimed that during the Holiday season of 2020, he gave close to $250k in prizes and cash to his MFAM community.

Nick goes out of his way to show his followers that he loves them, and they love him right back. To close out Summer, next weekend he is throwing a special BBQ for MFAM, all for free:

I follow a lot of streamers on Twitch and YouTube. Very few of them make the effort that Nick does to connect with his subscribers, and to communicate to them how much he appreciates them. As a result, they appreciate him even more, and the snowball just keeps rolling downhill.

 

Build a culture of customer appreciation

Most companies are dead set on acquiring new customers, but then when they make the first purchase, then they become a ‘current’ customer and it’s as if they enter this dark void and the company no longer cares. Smart companies, the ones that excel at creating happy and loyal customer, focus on customer retention as much if not more than customer acquisition.

You retain customers when customers feel happy and satisfied with your brand. By constantly listening to your customers, communicating with them and showing your appreciation, you keep them as customers. What’s more, those customers you keep go out and recruit new customers for you. Which greatly reduces your customer acquisition costs.

Having passionate fans doesn’t happen by accident. Taylor Swift doesn’t have fans because she is a rock star anymore than Nick Mercs has fans because he’s a Twitch streamer. There are plenty of rock stars and plenty of Twitch streamers who have almost no fans.

Happy customers don’t happen by accident, they are earned. Put in the work, show your customers that you love them, and mean it. That’s how you create happy and loyal customers.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Clubhouse’s Growth Slows, YouTube Pushing Users Back to TVs, the Power of Fandoms

Happy Monday! I hope you are ready for an amazingly productive week! Here’s some business and marketing stories that have caught my eye since last Monday:

 

So from February to April, Clubhouse saw its number of downloads fall by roughly 90%. To help combat this, Clubhouse is pushing for growth in Brazil and India, two countries where Android devices dominate over their iOS counterparts. With the introduction of Greenroom from Spotify, I think it signals that social audio is already shifting toward more targeted or niche groups, and I believe that will help accelerate Clubhouse’s decline. Clubhouse needed to own the social audio space before competitive offerings came out that offered a more niche appeal, and that hasn’t happened. I still think Clubhouse will be competitive in the social audio space for another 6-12 months at least, but it likely won’t end up being the dominant player in the space that we thought it could become.

 

I always find it fascinating how our content consumption patterns change over time and as we become more adept at using tools. For instance, YouTube now claims that roughly 40% of its viewership happens on TVs. What can we deduce from this?  That likely suggests that more YouTube users are viewing longer-form videos. Maybe it means they are viewing more movies on the platform, or maybe it is a sign that YouTube Gaming is continuing to gain in popularity, as most streams from gamers last several hours.

 

I love this deck on The New Fandom Formula by Zoe. It’s a great primer into the power of fans and online communities. Online communities are going to continue to become a major story in the coming months and years, as several stories are converging around the power of fans and customers connecting online. I’ve already talked about what’s happening in esports, but there’s much more on the way. And I love how Zoe’s deck has locked content, and if you want access to the full deck, you have to purchase it. I can speak from experience, creating a high-quality deck like this takes many hours. Content creators deserve to paid for creating high quality work like this, and I think the money asked helps communicate the value of the content. The free version has a ton of useful information so definitely check it out.

 

 

So that’s what I wanted to talk about this week! Now, let me warn you that there is a huge breaking news story happening on July 1st. It will have massive ramifications for the marketing and branding worlds, and I’m honestly shocked that more of my peers aren’t addressing what’s coming. Check back here on Weds for the rundown on what’s coming and why it’s relevant.

Till then, have a wonderful week, see you on Weds!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: eSports Has Gone Mainstream

Happy Monday, y’all! So I wanted to talk about one story only this Monday, but it’s a biggie.

For the past few years, eSports has been a growing phenomenon, fueled by the massive popularity of streaming site Twitch. I’ve written constantly about Twitch in particular, and how the streamers AKA ‘content creators’ are doing some amazing marketing and building impressive online communities.

For years, Twitch held almost a deathgrip on the streaming industry. It was the one and only powerhouse, in fact it seemed as if people had more loyalty toward the Twitch platform than the streamers themselves. This was quite apparent in 2019 when Microsoft’s would-be Twitch competiror Mixer signed away two of Twitch’s biggest streamers, Ninja and Shroud, to an exclusive deal.

It was a watershed moment for the streaming industry, and for the first time, Twitch would be tested for dominance in the streaming space.

How did it go? Less than a year later, Mixer folded and Ninja and Shroud both returned to Twitch.

So Twitch’s place at the top of the streaming space was cemented. Or was it?

When covid lockdowns took place early last year, it suddenly meant that a lot of us were spending a lot more time at home. One of the big winners was the streaming community. Growth hit another level, there was so much hunger for streamed video game content that sites such as YouTube and even Facebook began to benefit.

Then last June, DrDisrespect, one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, was suddenly banned. And still to this day, no one really knows why. Doc eventually settled on moving to YouTube, and in August had his first stream on Youtube.

Doc’s first stream on YouTube peaked at half a million concurrent viewers, shattering the amount of viewers he ever saw on a single Twitch stream.  Suddenly, YouTube Gaming wasn’t an afterthought, and the site’s foray into streaming continues to grow rapidly. Doc’s banning from Twitch may have indirectly catapulted streaming to a whole new level.

 

eSports Goes Mainstream

Last Thursday, this happened:

I’ve written about NickMercs here before, but he is rapidly growing in popularity and could soon become the most popular streamer in the world. His being featured on the cover of the new Sports Illustrated is testament to his growing popularity, but also the insane growth of the streaming community as a whole.

eSports and streaming is about to become VERY VERY big. There’s several reasons for this.

First, as eSports gets mainstream exposure, businesses are going to realize these streamers are the ideal influencers that they want to connect with.  They have huge audiences but, they also have, due to the chat and interactive functionality of streaming sites, the ability to better connect with their audiences. Streamers with millions of followers still have the ability to single out and even chat with individual followers live in a way that they really can’t do on other social media platforms. It’s a massive advantage from a community-building aspect. When companies figure this out, billions are gonna flow toward sponsorship deals.  Yes, I said BILLIONS.

Second, athletes are beginning to jump into streaming, which will only accelerate mainstream coverage and adoption. The above SI cover features 6 members of the eSports organization FaZe Clan. Two of them are Bronny James, the son of LeBron James, and another is Kyler Murray, former Heisman Trophy winner and current starting QB for the Arizona Cardinals. Soon we will begin to see more celebrities adopting eSports as well, and that will only lead to more eyeballs, and more growth.

Finally, eSports isn’t really political like other major sports have become. eSports simply focuses on the games and the community of fans and streamers that love them. In recent years, major sports leagues like the NBA, NFL and MLB have increasingly taken political stances, and audiences have repeatedly said they don’t want politics mixed with their sports. This means more people will be checking out eSports, especially the highly desirable 18-34 age demographic.

 

So I wanted to do a full post on eSports today. If you work in marketing, please do yourself a favor and invest some time with a few popular streamers and see how they market themselves, and how they build their community of fans.  Some of my favorites include NickMercs, DrDisrespect, CourageJD and TimTheTatMan. You can learn so much about marketing and especially connecting with millennials by watching their streams.

Streaming and eSports will have a big year in 2021. Let’s come back to this in 2022 and see if I was right!

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Here’s the 1% of Your Customer Base You Should Grow

In 2005, Alabama football started the season with an unexpectedly strong showing. The Tide, coming off a 6-win season in 2004, jumped out to a 4-0 start and #16 ranking heading into an October 1st matchup against #5 Florida. The game was in Tuscaloosa, and the excitement was palpable. Adding to the intensity, was the fact that all week heading into the game, the fact that Alabama had never beaten a Top 5 opponent in Tuscaloosa was repeated endlessly.

As you might expect, ticket prices for the game were through the roof, but I decided to go to the game just to be on campus and soak in the experience.  Due to traffic I got to the stadium a few minutes into the game. Outside the stadium there were multiple televisions set up so fans could watch the game. The game was being broadcast on CBS, and I began to circle the stadium heading toward the nearest television so I could watch the game.

The game was in the first few minutes of the first quarter. As I was walking, I could hear the roar of the crowd, it was very loud. A play started, and I then heard what almost sounded like a gasp from the entire crowd then what can only be called an explosion of sound. The sudden roaring of the crowd was so loud, that I could literally FEEL the audio waves coming from the stadium as I walked outside it.

This is what was happening inside the stadium at that moment (volume UP):

 

In 2018, Twitch streamers Nickmercs and Aydan were competing in a Fortnite tournament, and one of the perks was that if the team could eliminate a certain number of players in a specific time they could collect a $30,000 prize bonus.

As the duo got closer to winning the Make It Rain bonus, they were having trouble concentrating because debris from the ceiling kept falling on them as they was playing.

The crowd’s roar was so loud as Nickmercs and Aydan kept eliminating players that the ceiling was vibrating, and it was causing debris to fall down on the players.

 

We all start at zero

I’ve always been completely enamored with how entities and personalities in music, entertainment and sports/esports can create fans that are as passionate as the fans you see in the above two clips. One of the reasons why I wrote Think Like a Rock Star was to help companies understand how these fans are created, so those businesses can also create passionate fans.

One of the biggest misconceptions businesses have about creating fans is the belief that fans just ‘happen’ for people and companies in certain industries like sports, music, and entertainment.

Nickmercs is one of the streamers in the above video.  He’s also one of the hottest streamers in the world right now, and a few weeks ago he had over 400,000 viewers for one stream.

But recently, he tweeted out a reminder that in 2014, he was celebrating the fact that he had hit 170 viewers on a stream:

And he was excited about having 170 viewers, because he started with 0. All Twitch streamers do.

All businesses start with 0 happy customers. We ALL start at 0.

Reverse-engineering the Roar

Another huge misconception businesses have is that they can’t create fans like Alabama football does, or like Taylor Swift does or like Nickmercs does.

Let’s go back to the first example in this post of the Alabama football game. It’s easy for your business to look at that and think, “We could never have fans like that!”

Are you SURE about that?

Let’s break down that example. How many people are there that would claim to be Alabama football fans?  I have no earthly idea and it would be almost impossible to measure. For the purposes of this post, let’s say there are 10 Million people who self-identify as being Alabama fans.

The above Alabama-Florida game had roughly 80,000 people in attendance. Let’s say there were another 20,000 fans outside the stadium and in the area.  So for the purposes of this post, there were 100,000 Alabama fans who were passionate enough about the Crimson Tide to come to Tuscaloosa to see that game.

100,000 is 1% of 10 Million. So that means that only 1% of Alabama football fans were passionate enough about the Crimson Tide to come to Tuscaloosa on October 1st, 2005, to see them play.

So all the passion and electricity you saw in that video above, that wasn’t Alabama football fans.  That was the 1% of Alabama football fans who are the MOST PASSIONATE about the Crimson Tide.

Think about your business. How many customers do you have?

Let’s say your VP of Marketing wants to create a conference just for your customers.

Could you get enough customers to attend to make the event viable?  Maybe not.

But do you think you could get 1% of your customers to attend?  Yeah, that’s a possibility.

Then how is your business different from Alabama football or NickMercs or Taylor Swift when it comes to creating passionate customers that love you?

It isn’t. The difference is, Alabama football and NickMercs and Taylor Swift do a better job of ENGAGING their fans than your business does.

 

Excitement breeds excitement

Let’s say your business has 1,000 customers. 1% of 1,000 is 10. So you have about 10 customers that absolutely love your business.

Who are those customers? You should know who they are, their names, what they do. Your business should be in constant contact with them. Your business should empower those 1% of your customers to tell others about your business.

Let your most passionate customers be your best salespeople. Let them sing your praises to others. They are already doing this (because they love you), your business just needs to be smart enough to give them better tools to do what they are already doing.

That will lead to more customers for your business. And once your current customers see how you are engaging with, embracing and empowering your 1%, it will make them want to join that 1%.

What if your business could grow its customer base by 10% a year, and increase its 1% of customers that love you by another percentage point every year?

So start out with 1,000 customers and 10 customers who love you.

The next year, you have 1,100 customers and 20 customers who love you.

The third year, you have 1,210 customers and 30 customers who love you.

The fourth year, you have 1,331 customers and 52 customers who love you.

The fifth year, you have 1,462 customers and 73 customers who love you.

 

So in just 5 years, your customer base could grow by almost 50%, and the number of customers who love you could increase over sevenfold.

Think of the impact that amount of growth could have on your business. And it’s not just growth, it’s cumulative growth, fueled by engaging just 1% of your customers, and letting them spread their passion for your business to others.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: 31% of Adults ‘Constantly Online’, Pinterest & Twitch Continue to Grow

Happy Monday! Hope you are having a wonderful week as we close in on Memorial Day and the unofficial start of Summer! Here’s a few marketing and digital stories that caught my eye:

 

Interesting insights into which groups of US adults spend nearly every waking moment online. Amazingly, 31% of all adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online. The highest percentage came for adults aged 18-29, with a whopping 48% of this group saying they are almost constantly online. The lowest number came for adults aged 65+, with only 8% of this group claiming to be always online.

 

Twitch continues to post insane growth, and most marketers continue to miss it.  Just look at this chart of the number of monthly hours of streams watched since 2018.

Twitch growth

Want more stats on Twitch?

  • Last month was a record for Twitch with over 2.2 BILLION hours of content watched, and Twitch is on pace to beat that number this month
  • Last month was a record for Twitch with over 3.1 MILLION concurrent viewers. And yes, Twitch is on pace to beat that number this month as well.
  • In 2018, there were 560 Billion minutes of content viewed on Twitch.  There’s already been 620 Billion minutes consumed in 2021.

Twitch continues to be one of the best ways to reach a millennial audience. Besides that, if you are simply a marketer that wants to get a masterclass in how to build community and be better at marketing, watch how the top Twitch streamers connect with their followers. Anyone wanting to connect with customers under 30 should be paying attention to Twitch.

 

Pinterest is another social site that just continues to grow, whether or not marketers notice. The site just announced that it is now serving over 5 BILLION searches a month.  For reference, Pinterest reported 2 Billion searches in 2016.  So the volume of on-site searches has increased by 150% in 5 years. As I mentioned in last Monday’s Marketing Minute, Pinterest is poised to enter the livestreaming game as well. Along with Twitch, it continues to be a social site that all marketers should be aware of.

 

So that’s all I’ve got for this Monday, another big content week on tap here, see you tomorrow!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Telegram Surging, LinkedIn Joins Social Audio Bandwagon, Micro Influencers Get Engagement

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you had a glorious Easter weekend and are ready for a productive week.  Here’s some marketing and social stories that caught my eye:

 

The focus of this story is how Tik Tok continues to do well, but I think Telegram’s surge is more timely. Notice how high Telegram is on both the Downloads and Active Monthly Users lists. I mean, Telegram now has more Monthly Active Users than Twitter does. Which is ironic, since a decent amount of the new users going to Telegram are coming from Twitter. It’s also an interesting commentary on how social media is mirroring mainstream media when it comes to how people get their news and information. Up until the 1980s or so, most people got their news from the Big Three; NBC, ABC and CBS. Then cable television came along, with more shows and more options for news. And that trend has only intensified in the time since. I think we are seeing the same thing with social media. It used to be that most people when to Facebook and Twitter for breaking news. But since Facebook and Twitter have begun censoring accounts that share some information, people are following those banned users to other sites like Telegram. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  Do I think Telegram will be here 5 years from now? I’d say probably not, but then again there’s no guarantee that Twitter and Facebook will be either.

 

From the ‘We all saw this coming” department, LinkedIn is planning to incorporate social audio functionality into its platform. I think this may work better for LinkedIn than other platforms, as LinkedIn’s users are more geared toward professionals, which in this case simply means they are more likely to come from a similar background with similar interests. Contrast that to Twitter and Facebook, which is sort of a catch-all for users. I think social audio rooms work better for more tightly defined topics that attracts perhaps fewer people, but people who are more invested in the topic being discussed.

 

Micro influencers or T-Shaped Inflencers drive more engagement. This works because one to one engagement doesn’t scale and neither does your attention. As a person’s following increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to engage with everyone in that group. Having said that, Twitch streamers seem to have cracked the code on how to drive engagement at scale.

 

So that’s all I have for this week! I hope you have a wonderful week, and please subscribe to my Backstage Pass newsletter if you haven’t yet, by clicking the image below.

PS: I have a massive post coming tomorrow. Check back here then!

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Why Twitch is a Game-Changer For Letting Millennials Influence At Scale

Have you ever seen something, or heard an idea, and you knew it was significant, but you also knew that you didn’t fully appreciate why it was so important? I’ve spent a LOT of time with Twitch streams the last couple of years. The content creators are highly entertaining, and the best ones are great marketers, so I enjoyed watching the streams from that angle as well.

First, let’s back up a minute. What is Twitch? In short, Twitch is a site where people go to watch other people play video games. I know, on it’s surface, it sounds ridiculous. Why would anyone watch someone else play a video game, when they could play one themselves? But if you have children who play video games, it’s a safe bet they have spent time on either Twitch or YouTube watching people play those same video games. Often, people start out watching Twitch streams because they want to learn how to get better at playing a particular game. Twitch has functionality to let content creators stream themselves playing video games. But additionally, Twitch has chat functionality, which lets streamers talk to members of their chat inbetween games, and sometimes even during games. In fact, Twitch streamers can talk about (almost) any topic with their chat. You can go to Twitch and subscribe to a content creator’s stream, and this gives you access to join the streamer’s chat room and talk to other subscribers, as well as the content creator.

So I began to spend more time watching streams on Twitch over the last couple of years. I could tell all along that there was something bigger happening that I really didn’t fully grasp. So I kept watching, until one day, something clicked. I noticed that that the streamers kept referring to their chat as ‘chat’. As if the entire chat (and we are talking millions of followers in most cases) were a real person, and more importantly, ONE person. It’s common to hear streamers playing and then say things like:

“Chat, you’re doing that thing again!”

“My chat is saying the same thing.”

“Chat, I’m not playing that game, just stop!”

Now this may seem insignificant, but what these Twitch streamers have done, intentionally or not, is they have found a way to connect ‘individually’ with millions of people, at the same time.

They’ve found a way to scale their ‘personal’ attention from one person, up to millions at a time.

The biggest problem in dealing with traditional influencers is that their personal attention can only scale so far. If you’re wanting to work with an influencer on Twitter or Instagram, they can’t individually connect with more than a few dozen people. After that, it becomes problematic. This is why brands have begun to work more with microinfluencers or T-Shaped Influencers in recent years, because even though these influencers have much smaller followings, their networks are typically more niche and they have a much better ability to connect with their followers on an individual level. Which is one of the key drivers of true influence.

 

Twitch is different

A problem with traditional social media is that influencers lose the ability to connect with and influence individuals as their network grows. Twitch is different because it effectively lets the influencer livestream around a topic that the network is already interested in; video games. Chat functionality lets the streamers/content creators stay engaged with individuals and the content creators can even play games with the members of their network. All of this helps streamers better connect with more people. If you think about it, this is similar to a radio talk show. The host can take calls from the audience, so that gives them another layer of engagement. But with Twitch, they can talk in chat with the streamer, or the streamer can play a game with them, and they can talk directly with the streamer while playing the game with them.

These multiple layers of engagement make it easier for a streamer to build and hold influence with its audience. Think about someone on Twitter with say 250k followers. They can tweet, post Fleets, and livestream. But most will only tweet. They can interact directly with with individual followers, or with multiple followers via a hashtag. But the Twitter platform doesn’t lend itself to engagement at scale like the Twitch platform does.

 

What’s the key lesson here? 

What is influence? My definition is that influence is the ability of a person or entity (such as a brand) to create a desired change in behavior in a person (likely a customer) or other entity. We need to trust someone to be influenced by them, and a key way to achieve trust is interaction. This is where the traditional influencer model of one to many breaks down at scale. But, the functionality built into Twitch (chat room, being able to play games with subscribers) helps the content creator/streamer overcome the influence at scale issue, to a degree. So if you’re vetting influencers to use in your marketing campaign, one of the key factors to look at is the platforms they use, and each platforms ability to help the influencer achieve one-to-one interactions with its network.

Another way to look at this is if you are a brand that creates content, how can you best one-to-one interactions with as many people as possible? Maybe you do a sponsorship working with influencers on a platform like Twitch, or maybe you try using these platforms yourself.

Just focus on creating as many positive interactions with each member of your desired audience. That helps facilitate trust, which helps create influence.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Big Facebook Lawsuit, Radio Revival, Twitch/Wendy’s Team-Up

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone is having a wonderful December and is getting ready for Christmas and the Holidays! On a personal note, I wanted to thank all of you for your support since I ‘re-launched’ this blog in late August. All of us have dealt with adversity this year, and 2020 was already off to a slow start for me before covid hit. I was forced to take a step back and refocus on how I managed my social connections as well as the content I create, and to what end. I’m starting to get the content focus dialed in, and have begun to see the bounce-back in engagement I was hoping for. Your support is what continues to make that possible, and I greatly appreciate it!  Let’s jump into this week’s news!

 

The FTC and 46 states have sued Facebook. In short, they want Instagram and WhatsApp to be split from Facebook, and also put any future acquisitions Facebook makes over $10M to be subject to certain restrictions. This is by far the biggest legal threat Facebook has faced to date. I don’t want to sound like I’m beating a dead horse, but regardless of who our president is on January 20th, 2021, big social media sites will come under increasing legal and regulatory scrutiny. If your company is actively creating content on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you need to keep one eye on these developing stories, as they could have a massive impact on your digital content strategies in 2021 and beyond.

 

On of the themes I’ve been covering the last few months is how customer behavior has changed as a result of more people spending more time at home as a result of dealing with covid. This has even impacted radio, as people stopped commuting as much to work, audiences for terrestrial AM and FM radio slipped. Nielsen has found that radio listeners have now returned to 97% of pre-pandemic levels. But I don’t think that means we are all going back to our daily commutes to work. What I suspect it means is that some of us are still working from home, but we’ve changed our behavior to start listening to the radio at home. Apps like Tune-In make it very easy to listen to our favorite radio stations from home. So I suspect that once we are completely past the disruptions that the pandemic has caused to our workflows, that we will see radio listener numbers actually higher than they were prior to the pandemic.

 

Man, these kids on Twitch are making a boatload of money! I’ve written before about how Twitch streamers are expert content creators, and the site’s popularity was already growing by leaps and bounds. But so many of us being stuck at home more often during 2020 was perfect timing for Twitch, and the site has taken off like a rocket this year. Companies have been jumping on the bandwagon and sponsoring the most popular streamers. Recently I got an email from Wendy’s talking about a promotion they are doing with different Twitch streamers. It really makes great sense; these streamers often stream for 6-8 hours a day, and their subscribers are paying attention to those streams for hours. So it’s a perfect chance for a savvy company like Wendy’s to promote a service the streamers and audience will need; food!

Hope you have a wonderful week, see you back here tomorrow!