We often talk about social media being good for and used by different kind of companies, but another major benefit that social media offer is to bring out new talents.
I wanna share to you a short version of how Justin Bieber got famous. He was a Canadian guy that througout his life have had a big interest in music. He was good and people around him saw his talent. He begun singing on the streets in his hometown and entering local talent shows. His relatives had heard about this and wanted to see him perform. Then the family came up with the idea of posting the clips on YouTube to let the relatives see and listen. But there wasn’t only his relatives that was watching. Thousands of people watched and started commenting. They wanted to see more. So he continued posting videos. One day he got discovered through YouTube by a guy in the business. But that is not the end of the story. That guy helped him a lot but the industry still wasn’t sure of a young guy with a kind of childish voice. So he went to radio station after radio station, performed in schools etc. But still no big breakthrough even though he had started to build up a fan page. Then Justin got Twitter and started tweeting about where he was playing next. Suddenly groups of people was waiting for him outside the places he tweeted about and the crowds only got bigger and bigger. I really don’t think that I need to tell you more but today Justin is incredibly famous and loved by people all over the world. His Twitter account, @justinbieber
, has 30,102,972 followers as of today and he follows 122,525. He has tweeted 19,360 times. He tweets and retweets every day and he often writes about how much his fans means to him, and seriously, they do because it was them that made him famous.
So how can you learn from this to other businesses?
- Understand the power of social media – but also that it also needs to be really, really good and special to go viral
- See the important connections between offline and online
- Showing personality and compassion is important – show the fans why they should love you, and then love your fans as much as they love you