What is a Small World?

How does one break out and benefit from more exposure?

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” ~ Rick Blaine referring to Ilsa Lund, Casablanca.

Rick ruminates about how the beautiful woman, Ilsa Lund, happened to walk into his life when she walked into Rick’s Café Américain. Rick’s place is a small world. While there may by thousands of gin joints in all the towns and in this world, there would be only two or three such places in the town of Casablanca, Morocco. Her chances would be quite great especially since she needed to escape and he was noted as the person who could make it happen.

Sunrise in California

The concept of a small world is equally applied to the exposure a single person gets in a crowd of similar people. In the attendance crowd at a venue such as the historic gathering at Woodstock where upwards of 500,000 gathered for three days or the 80K crowd at Coachella there will be those who came for one particular reason or performance or another. All together they comprise a population of music lovers who have the time, money and inclination to venture out to the venues and experience the festivities. On one hand, the crowd seems to be highly similar but as opposed to the whole US population. On the other, within the crowd there are smaller pockets of interest in specific performers. The larger venue is the driving factor in getting all the diverse interests together.

The people there are members of groups who arrived together and constitute a pod of concert goers. Each of these pods can be thought of as a small world with similar interests. Collectively, they make up the Universe.

How this all applied to Twitter and product marketing is this. If each pods of attendees were the only ones to arrive, the concert would be a bust. If they did not communicate one pod to others there would be far less exposure to the venue. In the small world of NFT photographers and artists, we each are all disconnected pods. What is needed is: connection.

A shill-account on Twitter can promise to Tweet a person’s content to their randomly accumulated followers and the artist will make sales. The question is just how many of those followers they claim to have are really interested in what you as a photographer have to offer? Those accounts specialize in accumulating followers to make themselves look good and ostensibly effective. However, they don’t provide any guarantees of outcome for their fees.

Let’s look at Twitter users who have several hundred followers. I’m going to use the number 300 as an average. Because we all have been marketing ourselves in the same space, a significant number of them will be duplicated among the crowd. I will use a 50% unduplicated name uniqueness factor. So on the average we all each have about 150 unique followers. Now if a selection of 50 photographers agree to Retweet each other’s content, those RTs could be reaching 7,500 followers. This dynamic is powerful in reaching far beyond what any one account can do.

It is important to keep in mind that the marketing strategy is not to try to sell to other photographers/artists. Peppered in each user’s follower list is the few buyers and collectors who are the ultimate audience for our marketing efforts. More importantly, those buyers/collectors are highly qualified and have shown interest in buying for some of us. They are not random Twitter handles in a farmed list. They are watching what is presented. They are not asking for product to be shown to them like the Hollywood “cattle call” which gets hundreds of wannabee actors and actresses to show up.

My actions are not to RT everything which crosses my feed but I do RT the images which closely match my style and interests. If we all do the same, our content will get highly qualified targeted exposure.

Unless we do some activity like I described above we all remain isolated in our own small bubble world where we can’t break out and others cannot see in.

Post Script,
A small world encounter.

I chose the Casablanca example above as a good example of how one experiences the small world. Well…

I took a break before publishing this article and put the DVD in the player which arrive only today. It was the first disk of Season 2 of The Orville by Seth MacFarlane and in the opening of the first episode they were playing a vinyl recording of “As Time Goes By.” WHAT are the chances? Two Casablanca reference within hours of each other.

So there you have it. We exist in tiny universes and must do our best to break out of them into the larger space.

The Twitter-verse is a Small World

Shouting into the wind.

If a Twitter account has a million or more followers it is probably because its owner is some celebrity level persona who get followers merely be existing.

These people started out well known and famous and the followers materialize as soon as the account went live.

It is important to understand that there is little similarity among the demographic other than their propensity for following celebrity accounts.

The content of the tweets are basic and convey little more than a visual sound bite like “today I sneezed” and 34,565 people will LIKE it, 4,764 people will RT it and 6,351 will comment on it. In part the allure is being the first person in one’s small circle to be the one to mention it.

The connectivity dynamics of Twitter is if I Like your tweet, I get your attention. If you Like mine, you get my attention. Mostly it stops there. If either of us comments on the others tweet, there is a limited spread of our identities across the platform.

The real influence is when a RT takes place.

You and I are operating in the same mini-twitterverse. Let’s say I have 193 followers and you have 53k. If you grew that following organically, as opposed to buying 52k random handles, then there is a high probability that your list contains most if not all of the ones in my following. It’s just statistics. We have been marketing ourselves in the same neighborhood. It is only natural there would be a significant overlap.

What this means is my RT of your content generates negligible exposure for you. On the other hand when you with 53k organic followers RT my content, I can get a huge bump in my exposure. Unfortunately, if your followers don’t re-engage with my content shown to them by your RT then I get next to nothing. This is why purchased random accounts only make an account “look good” but do not perform.

When looking at who one should follow and engage with it is important to attempt to weed out the bots which respond to everything.

The annoying bots can be in your face and obvious. This is one of the “Lovely Content” bots that reply to every new post a person makes that contains an image.

I tested the nature of the silly bugger by posting an image complaining about the bots. This bot auto replied with a “Lovely Content” message.

These accounts proliferate by the hundreds, if not thousands, and are impossible to avoid. They can be identifies by their Zero to maybe 20 followers rating. Yes a new and earnest account would start out that way, but bot s have bot-behaviors. For a while I was blocking the Lovely Content bots but that became a wasted effort. New one popped up as fast as I would block them. Now I just ignore them.

Other bot-like accounts post messages they are buying NFT today and you should shill your items and they will buy a few from their Followers or will RT them if you RT the offer. No self-respecting shill-bot would have any number fewer than a 5-figure Follower count. Typically they have 30k to 50k or more Followers. Their bio usually touts their expertise at promoting your material. Have you ever seen one of these accounts follow up with what they purchased? I didn’t think so. If you did, I’d like to see the tweet they posted that you saw.

The Bots are a waste of time. I shilled some of my NFT long enough to be experienced enough with them to write about them. The best action is to interact with other photographers in your Followers bracket (100 to 2–3K). Comment, share, follow and RT among ourselves. If the “big guys” with 102.5K followers really wants to see our NFT and buy them, they will peruse the field and make offers.

My experience with Opensea.io is that if I mint new items in the evening (8–9 EDT) I will get 1 to 3 Favors on some items even as I am completing the next one. I usually do 3 0r 4 at a time. This means there are people watching a “live feed” of new content being created. One night I minted 5 images and got 4,3,3,1 and 0 Favorites on them. While the people representing the 3s could all be the same three people and be included in the 4, there were at least 4 people watching and possibly as many as 11. Probable more like the 4 count.

a Street Coin from my listings.

OpenSea.io has what is called the API which allows app developers to access the databases and pull such data. This is good. What it also means is the serious collectors are invisible and not out asking hopeful artists such as us to hand them the picture. Besides, then one of these shill-bots gets 1,000 or more replies, no one ever sees most of them. Just use your own scroll-down experiences to see how quickly you stop looking.