Picture this: you’re at a farmers’ market looking to buy fish. As you move through the stands, you hear, “Fresh fish, caught two hours ago, come get it!”
You go toward that sound and find three fishmongers: the one who beckons his clients and two others chitchatting.
Where do you stop, and where do you buy from?
All other things being equal, most people would buy from the fishmonger who caught their attention in the first place.
And yet, there’s a new genre of advice making the rounds on all (social) media platforms:
- “Attention is overrated.”
- “The attention economy is DEAD!”
- “Stop chasing views.”
- “Focus on X instead.” (pick your favorite: trust, systems, backend, community)
The argument sounds sophisticated because it positions itself above the noise. But, ironically enough, it’s designed to get more attention.
When I started seeing these posts/videos, I rolled my eyes so hard that a NASA intern logged it as a minor orbit.
Let’s be honest for a change, shall we? Attention still matters. Now that it’s become scarcer, attention matters even more than it did before.
When everyone can churn out a post, a video, heck, even a website or an app with AI in hours, people are drowning in content and their attention just got more expensive.
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You may have seen me say that retaining attention is more important than getting it. I stand by that because attention is fickle and revenue doesn’t happen without retention.
However, what the “the attention economy is dead!” gurus get wrong is that
Nothing happens without attention!
Nada, zilch, niente!
Sure, trust matters — it’s pivotal even. So do credibility, proper offers, and more. But how are people supposed to trust you if they don’t pay attention to you in the first place?
To get to their wallets, you also have to get their attention first.
Listen, I get why this trend happened: saying that you’re in it for the attention sounds desperate, cheap even. So when someone says “likes ain’t cash” or similar, we feel seen — we don’t want to be influencers, right?
We just want a normal but profitable business. Thus, we end up skipping the first annoying, yet necessary step: getting attention.
Still, something did shift in the attention economy:
Supply exceeds demand — by orders of magnitude
It’s been decades since the Internet started hosting more content than the entire world population could possibly consume.
5% of YouTube videos get no views, while 75% of them get no comments. Yet, people still upload over 20 million videos to YouTube every damn day.
Every second, the internet generates massive amounts of (social) media content. Also, 6 new websites go live every second!
When AI empowered everyone to churn out terabytes of content in minutes, the proverbial shit truly hit the fan.
We’re all drowning in content, but we all have the same 24 hours to consume it.
When supply increases faster than demand, the scarce resources become more valuable. In our case, the resource is attention.
We have less available attention and more competition for it. This combination raises the cost of earning it but doesn’t render it meaningless.
Attention is the entry point. It always has been, it always will be
What has changed, though, is the way to get that attention.
For years, most of my clients told me “I found you on social media but bought from you because of your emails”. Social media was the discovery medium, the way to grab attention.
It still is in most cases.
But there’s a shift I started noticing half a year ago or so.
People retreat to safer spaces to get and pay attention
“I found you on Medium”. “My friend [X] speaks highly of you.” “Three people mentioned your community in the past month” – I heard all of these multiple times since the beginning of the year.
I wonder if I’ll start hearing them more often than “I found you on social media”.
Within The Council, I see members focusing on:
- Private communities (obviously)
- Speaking gigs
- Podcasting tours
- Local businesses
- Referral systems
- Outreach
None of these gives them theoretical access to the billions of people social media “offer”. But they do give them attention, often guaranteed. Which is something that social media can’t do.
In a sense, I see people reverse their social media strategy: they don’t use it for discovery as much as they used to. They now use it for referrals, to stay in touch with peers, and to have a public profile where leads might go to find/vet them.
The “post consistently for 6 months and you’ll be rich” advice is losing traction. More than ever before, your social media approach needs to be strategic.
How I’m thinking about discovery platforms these days
Being a guest on podcasts and joining private communities have been great for me, so I have no plans to stop.
As you already know, my most important platform is my newsletter. However, newsletters and email in general have zero discoverability. Thus, I need places where I can grab attention, so I can establish trust via email later on.
LinkedIn, my top discovery platform, is decidedly meh right now. Medium is still working, but it’s a slow trickle.
So:
- I started a YouTube channel. Right now, I’m at the very top of cringe mountain and I’m ok with it. I’m giving YouTube and myself three months to gauge the traction I can get and to learn how to make better videos.
- I’m considering spending more time on Threads than LinkedIn (connect with me there if you haven’t already). It’s more fun, and it’s far easier to get discovered there than on LinkedIn. With barely any following, I’ve actually gotten clients from Threads.
Looking back, I’ve ran about 1-2 experiments a year with new discovery platforms. Some flopped, others worked – as it happens with experiments in general.
However social media will evolve in the future, its role as a discovery or connection platform will not die off anytime soon.
A quick note on outreach
To me, outreach is still a way of getting attention. Whether you call this getting leads or growing your audience, the result is the same: more people in your orbit, which is almost always a good thing.
I’ve never done cold outreach and barely done any warm outreach. Still, I understand its importance and, given how unreliable social media reach is, I’m begrudgingly admitting it’s hard to get by without it.
So I started doing some warm outreach in recent months using the classic approach: “I saw you’re interested in [product]. Can I answer any questions for you?”
I don’t think my business is a fit for cold outreach, so you’ll probably never see me slide into the DMs of people I’ve never spoken to.
Yet, I understand I need to get better at it, and I’m happy that The Council members pushed me to do it. They requested a sprint on outreach and, since it wasn’t something I could teach, I asked for external help.
Long story short, we’re kicking it off next week with three amazing guest speakers (Talica Davies, Alison Knott, and Zsike Peter) who will teach all of us how to do outreach, make sales, and keep a full pipeline without hating our lives.
I can’t wait for it!
When supply exceeds demand, capital discipline should decide how you pursue attention
Whenever the world feels confusing and uncertain, I like to simplify business decisions by going back to Econ 101 and first principles.
Right now, we know that:
- The supply of content exceeds the demand for it.
- As creators or publishers, we have limited capital (time and money) to invest in content creation and distribution. Just like our audience has limited attention capital.
Since I don’t want to turn my solo business into a full-fledged production company, I have to be disciplined with the channels I choose to be on.
To me, YouTube makes sense as a long-term play (if it passes my 3-month test) and Threads is a sidekick (or potential replacement) for LinkedIn — a platform for short-lived, non-compounding assets (yeah, we still need those).
Together with my other platforms, these can theoretically create both passive value and visibility loops.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
What about you? What’s your system for visibility loops and getting attention? Reply and let me know!
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