Platforms and their Audience

A platform is a place upon which you can stand and deliver a message, an audience can be defined as the people who pay attention to that platform and therefore hear the message.  It is important to note here that the audience pays attention to the platform, not necessarily the message.

Delivering a message to people through a platform that they will hear and pay attention to is a little more complex.  One of the key barriers you must overcome is engagement.  That is, you must pique the interest of your audience by playing to their interests.  There is a slight problem with this as someone who wants to deliver a message you need to cater that message to what the audience wants to hear, which can often be the opposite of your message.  The problem if it was not obvious is that it is hard to make someone pay attention to something they are not interested in.

This is where we need to draw a line of distinction between your intended audience and the actual audience you have.  A lot of people online do not succeed in doing this, which results in their message being contained within a small bubble and spreading no further.  To give you an example, let's say you create a website to support a particular political party, let's call it the Banana Party.  You want to reach out to people, your intended audience would be voters, but to be more specific it would be undecided voters.  What will often end up being the case is that you will gather support for your site by promoting it through social media and advertising among other methods of marketing.  Your website becomes your platform and your message is its content.  You will use other platforms such as twitter or facebook to try and spread that message.  The most likely place you will start on these platforms will be by finding existing communities that already support the Banana Party.

The problem with this is that you are growing your actual audience but you are not growing your intended audience.  Spreading a message to people who already support that message does not achieve anything.  You are not gaining greater exposure for your cause, you are in fact becoming more insular.  You are not reaching undecided voters you are reaching people who already intend to vote for the Banana Party.

This post was inspired by a video on Youtube by a prominent gay youtuber who shall remain nameless.  His video was one promoting marriage equality in the USA.  While his sentiment may be noble his message is insular.  The majority of people if not all of the people who actually watch his videos and subscribe to him already support marriage equality by virtue of the fact that they support him and his message.  That is not reaching a new audience, that is in essence just ego stroking.  Saying something your audience will love and receiving praise for it from that audience is insular.

There's a reason why some other youtubers who are more successful do collaborations with other youtubers - because they want to grow their audience and reach new people - in other words they actively try to find their intended audience.  Having millions of subscribers is not security, and to rely on that cushion and become complacent is dangerous.  Like any economy in order to be sustainable the number of new subscribers has to negate the number who are leaving; complacency leads to the number of new subscribers reducing.  In the example of the Banana Party, you will not increase the number of votes your party will get by preaching your message to Banana voters, you need to reach people who are undecided, people who are apolitical and convince them there is a reason to vote, people who have questions that no-one has answered or been willing to answer.  In political campaigning this is known as a Grassroots approach.  Relying on traditional voters is insecure as for many reasons over time that number will drop naturally if you do not engage with new voters.  One reason why parties in the UK are struggling to gain majorities in opinion polls is due to undecided younger voters.

You need to understand the difference between your actual audience and your intended audience.  Your actual audience is the one you have, but having that audience does not at all imply they will actually listen to you.  Your intended audience is the one that you want to reach, the people you want to listen to your message.  The two will not always be synonymous, and often pursuing an intended audience can alienate your actual audience when you have a message that they are not interested in.

So how do you solve this problem?  If you look at those who have been successful in growing their audiences and how they achieved it you can see that division is the best strategy.  Many popular youtubers as an example have multiple channels, where they cover different types of content.  Those who like those types of content will subscribe to those channels, those that don't will not, but crucially, as that content is kept separate from the main channel, they do not unsubscribe from it as a result.  If you take this strategy and scale it up you end up with the same behaviour being used in large scale organisations.  Companies frequently split into subsidiaries where particular products and services are grouped together - this appeases investors as it keeps the content they are interested in separate, while still contributing to the wealth of the organisation as a whole.  In our political party example many parties have youth wings, which are specifically tasked with targeting younger voters, this leads to engagement and gives younger voters a voice, crucially the issues that affect those voters are explicitly addressed and this is done in a way that has influence within the party as a whole.

In the case of the video that inspired this post, the issue to be found there is that the video has been made on a platform where the reach of the video is only the actual audience and not the intended audience.  While most of the suggestions on how to remedy this would be futile and fruitless, this raises an important point about criticism: you do not have to have a better solution to be able to point out flaws in the current.  Understanding those flaws leads to a thought process that can ultimately result in a better solution.  That thought process would never commence if flaws in the current solution were never brought to light.

We did not need to know the world was round in order to point out the flaws in assuming it was flat.  Thinking about those flaws led to the eventual conclusion that the world was round.  Without drawing attention to those flaws this would not have even been considered.  I use the word "was" as "round" implies a spherical shape, which we now know the Earth is not.  The Earth is closer to an egg shape, an Oblate Spheroid to be precise.