Understanding the Social Currency of Owning Your List

Jake is the co-founder and CEO of Project Broadcast. He has 20+ years of software development experience and a decade of experience working with network marketing and direct sales professionals to bring products and tools to market to help them rock their business. A self professed curly headed winning machine, Jake has a huge heart for entrepreneurship, cars, family, and 80s cartoons!

July 20 • 5 min read

Remember the days when the word Social Media didn’t even exist? I know I’m dating myself over here but I remember when I first tried MySpace in the early 2000s and thought it was such a cool product. I think people forget how young the internet really is in terms of widespread use. I remember first becoming part of the internet culture in the mid 90s with a CD-ROM of AOL 2.0 that gave you some number of free hours of access. Yes, back then you paid for your internet in terms of how many hours/minutes you would be “online”. It is crazy to think how now the internet is as ubiquitous as air and it feels every device is connected to it. But not that long ago we had to listen to the handshake of a dial up modem getting us online and were then greeted with that legendary phrase: “You’ve got mail”.

Ah, times have certainly changed from those early days of chat rooms where every person was in a single thread of conversation and you had to look for the folks you were talking with as the screen of conversation rushed by. Social networking didn’t really exist then. It came later in the early 2000s and MySpace started as the lead horse that truly brought the idea to the masses. Facebook arrived on the scene and began to eat away at MySpace’s customer share. By 2009, Facebook had more US visitors and became the dominant player in the space. Many other social networks have emerged over the years and gained immense popularity such as Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Clubhouse, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc. The list goes on and on. What we know is this space continues to fragment and doesn’t seem to have an end in sight. In fact, Facebook just announced their new platform Threads recently and gained 70 million users in a single day.

Why does all this matter? As a business you have to start thinking about your social graph as a form of currency! You want direct access to that currency and not have it locked up in a multitude of platforms where you don’t own the relationship. Let me explain what I mean by that. Let’s pretend you have 1k followers on Instagram. At the same time, you post content on Instagram and it’s viewed by your 1k followers (if the algo is on your side) and hopefully by others not yet following you. You have influence. You have social currency! But, let’s say you want to tap into that currency? How do you tap into all the people that view your content and your followers? Are you going to DM every one of them individually? As you can imagine, that won’t scale. The challenge with fragmentation in the market is that you have customers and colleagues on different platforms. Some use FB, some IG, some others, some none! You typically find that your audience as a whole is fragmented across multiple channels.

You need direct access to that social currency you are building across all the various platforms! You need to curate those disparate audiences into your own list. You should think of list building like a funnel. Your presence on social media across all the various platforms is the top of that funnel. You’ve got connections you’ve made, people who view and interact with your content, and even serendipitous interactions due to the social algorithms. Ok, if you have all those eyeballs across multiple platforms, how do you drive them deeper into your funnel so that you can get to the lowest common denominator and have direct access to them all easily!

Ok, you knew this was coming! I’m excited to say that Project Broadcast can help you achieve this! Listen, you are already posting across these various channels. Why not leverage Project Broadcast to move that relationship off platform into a more direct communication. Here is a stat for you: 81% of Americans use texting. No social platform has 81% of Americans on it. Facebook does claim 71% of Americans use Facebook regularly but we also know that those algorithms aren’t there to ensure my content is viewed by my social network. They are there to allow Facebook to understand which ads should be served! There is a middle man between the conversation of me and my audience and their incentives do not align with mine.

What do you find more personal: a message on FB or IG or a text from someone? Texting is personal. It’s direct. It’s low friction. It doesn’t have ulterior motives to not show your message to the recipient. You can get eyeballs from all over your social graph across multiple platforms into a single list so that, when you want to leverage that currency of your network, you can in a single place that offers a direct line to your audience!

So how do you do that? Well that part is actually fairly easy! Start socializing your Project Broadcast phone number as your business phone number. Why not put “Text Me: 555-555-5555” in your IG bio? How about when posting about your products and services you provide a CTA (call to action) for the viewer to send you a text to learn more. You could even use our Keywords feature in Project Broadcast to create automation so that you can instruct folks in your posts, reels, bio, linktrees, etc to text a specific word or phrase to trigger Project Broadcast to do some texting magic on your behalf.

There are tons of strategies to get this going. Pick one and try it! I bet you’ll surprise yourself in that you’ll grow your texting list faster and it will consist of people across multiple platforms. Ultimately you’ll have them all in Project Broadcast where you have direct 1:1 communication opportunities with your audience and have all the powerful features of Project Broadcast such as campaigns, landing pages, etc at your disposal to engage with them in a deeper and more direct way!