You Ask, I Answer: What is a Social Media Platform?

In today's episode, Michael asks, do you consider YouTube and or Reddit to be a social network a social media platform? Why? Yes. Um a social network, social media, is any content hub where the value and the benefit of it is driven by Metcalf's law. So for those who are unfamiliar, Bob Metcalf, who was the inventor of Ethernet, uh the cables that you plug into your computer to connect to the internet, uh, came up with this law back in the 70s uh called Metcalf's Law.

And fundamentally, what it says is that the value of a network is uh equal to the square number of nodes in the network. And the way he explained it was the back then the telephone. One person who has a telephone really just has a a a lump of plastic, right? There's no value in it. Once two people have a telephone, then there's value.

They can call each other. And every telephone that appears on the network increases the value of the network, including the value to the people who are already there, right? So every person who gets, you know, uh a new uh smartphone, right, in the world, increases the value of my smartphone that I already have because the network effect is uh in essence saying that my utility that I get on the network increases in proportion to the number of network users. Now we know this to be true for phones, faxes, email, and social media. Social media is defined by the network effect.

If one person has Twitter, they're literally are talking to themselves. Right? If one person has YouTube, they're literally talking to themselves. YouTube, the value of YouTube is the the people who are uploading their content, right? It is not for the most part massive corporations pushing content in a one-way fashion.

The same for Reddit. Reddit is a hundred percent a social network because people are putting content there of their own. Reddit, the corporation, is not throwing content on there other than the ads, right? And the advertisers would have no value if there were no people in the network. That's a key part.

If there were no users, right? And and the value the users are getting from each other was absent. There would be no need for advertisers. So when we think about Metcalf's law and we apply it to this, a lot of things are social networks, right? Old style bullet board forms and BBSs and things are social networks because the value comes from the users.

Contrast that to something like a book, right? This book's utility does not change for me the more copies there are of it. Right? I the whether there's one copy, a million copies, when I open this book, there's no additional value for me. It is it is what it is.

It has intrinsic value of its own, and that's important, but it doesn't increase in value the more people who own it. YouTube increases in value the more people who are on it. Even if only one percent of people publish content on there, that fraction of a percentage of the audience is still growing, and every new creator, one out of a hundred who joins in, provides me additional benefit because they're they're putting up creator like Peter Hollins, there is there's you know, uh uh uh Jake Paul or something doing silly stuff, uh but there is utility there for others in the network and it grows. This is important because this changes our definition of what social media is. We think you know Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and those the big networks, but they're not the only ones.

And what a lot of social media marketers have done really wrong in the last few years is become so hyper focused on the big hubs that they forgot the definition of social media, and when they forget that definition, they put blinders on, and the value of social media declines, right? If you're all in on Facebook, and it's the only thing you see, and you're like, say, a B2B marketer. Well, what about Spiceworks? Spiceworks is a tremendous interactive form that meets all the criteria of a social network, and that is subject to network to Metcalf's law. But you don't think about that.

You don't you forget that it exists. If you're a photographer, right, and you are on uh LinkedIn, you're trying to draw my business, and you know you don't want to pay $50 for an in mail to be introduced to clients. Cool. What about 500 pixels or Pixiv, right? Uh, or Flickr.

If you're an artist, what about DeviantArt? Deviant art is 100% a social network. Right, the value comes from the users, uh, and the more of them there are, the greater the value is. Uh what about Pornhub? Guess what?

There's an awful lot of user-generated content there too. That may not be the if your audience, although it probably is because there's uh way more people who use it than they say they do, but it's a social network, right? Think about what would happen if you took the core features of a social network away, right? Likes, comments, shares, uploads. Those are the sort of the major four features that allow a user to provide value to the network.

If you took those things away, would the network have any utility? If I took the ability for you to post on Reddit and like and comment and share, how useful would Reddit be to you? Not very, right? If I took away like, comment, share, and upload from YouTube, how useful would it be to you? Right?

By taking away those core social features, we strip away that social aspect. Uh and we essentially negate Metcalf's law. Because even though there's more people, if they can't provide value to you through the mechanisms of the network, it's not a social network. Um so expand your horizons. Twitch, 100% a social network.

Um GitHub, if you are after developers, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, all those places, 100% social networks, and they're niche enough that you can get value out of it without having to spend a whole lot of money, if any at all, right? You can use all the tactics that used to work on Facebook back in 2014 and use them today in those places and generate tremendous value and impact for your organization, right? Uh Discord, 100% a social network. It it is a network of networks, right? So finding a Discord that serves your community or Slack, finding a a Slack that serves your community, is a gold mine.

Uh if you have not joined, for example, my analytics for marketers slack, go to trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers, got a thousand people in there. Is it as big as Facebook? No. But is it the right people? The people who are receptive to wanting to talk about analytics for marketing?

A hundred percent, right? Those are the people that I as a business owner, I want to talk with those people. I want to listen to what they have to say. I want to interact with them, and that's the value of all these niche networks. But if we have our blinders on about Metcalf's law, and we have our blinders on about, you know, the the big tech companies being the only social networks on, we lose out on all that value.

We don't see it, and we can't generate results. And then we think social media is not for us, right? What a dangerous position to be in, as opposed to saying seeing it for what these things are and going, wow, that really is for me because that's where my users are. So I absolutely consider YouTube and Reddit to be social media platforms, but there are hundreds, if not thousands out there that are, including ones that are right for your business. Actually, I know there's thousands, because even in Discord, there's multiple Discord communities, multiple Slack communities.

There's one out there for your business. Go find it, go become an active participant. And you know what? If there isn't one, start one. And then it's yours.

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