We both know that blindly hoarding social media followers is a hollow vanity metric.
If there is no actual, iron clad business trust anchoring those people to the floorboards, you just have a loud room full of strangers.
You want to build a following that trusts you implicitly. You want to weave a cosy little digital womb where your fans float suspended in the warm, gelatinous amniotic fluid of Absolute Agreement. (Sounds very gross, yes, but stick with me)
You want an echo chamber.
If you let a single, jagged dissenting thought into the pen, the sheep start trying to do calculus, their brains overheat, and nobody wants to clean up that mess.
And if you’ve read any Lovecraft over the years. Here’s a little twist the way he would be proud of…
It’s the secret to keeping that echo chamber ringing and the conversions flowing…
You cannot live inside it.
Bold and underlined for emphasis, duh.
If you get high on your own supply, your brain smooths out into a frictionless bowling ball. To build the perfect walled garden, you have to strap on your hazmat suit and wade neck deep into the radioactive sewage of the entire internet. (What’s left of it that is)
You need to tighten up the reigns. Be it your email list, your Discord, FB group etc or your heavily curated comments section.
That needs to be hermetically sealed. If someone brings in an outside opinion, you purge it like a parasitic tapeworm tearing through the digestive tract.
You need to regurgitate their own fears and desires back into their waiting, baby bird mouths. Give them the warm milk of certainty.
Prime example. I was in one of those prepper doomer end of the world groups not so long ago doing some research and all I had to do was feed back their fears when politics takes over and destroys “the free world” The comment section went nuts. If I was allowed to sell a $20 pdf on how to combat this. I would’ve probably been able to retire.
And as much as I tend to keep a neutral eye on politics and while the rest of the people gorge on the slop, you have to eat everything else too.
The far left and right manifestos, the centrist oatmeal, while consuming the entire, terrifying spectrum of human madness. Talk about every aspect. It’s a whole filtering process.
You need to understand the architecture of the outside world to build better, thicker, more terrifying walls for your list. It’s a gruelling, soul rotting existence. You are the sin eater. You gorge on the toxic nuance of the world so your followers can dine on the simple, smooth paste of absolute tribalism.
For lack of a better phrasing. You have to be ready to start chewing the glass so your flock doesn’t have to and then they will stick around longer because your views are their views but filtered better…
Anyways, it’s hot and humid as balls over here and my brain is melting.
TL;DR Your world needs to be an echo chamber where people come to you for your views and ideas, while you also wander out into the big bad internet and absorb all of the bullshit so that they don’t have to. Then you can feed it to them cleanly and with your own views neatly wrapped inside of it.
Stephen Walker.