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Shawn Zou

Can you turn social media following into a business?

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Hi Product Hunters! The past year our little social media project has gained immense traction in our local market (Taiwan) and we're leveraging this to build a content platform for verified professionals to share their knowledge - what's more is we're building an entire healthcare business based on the following. Our big question to ourselves can basically be summed into the question below Media Company vs. Open Content Platform, what about a mix of both? How do you think about a curated quality content (Netflix) vs. freely expressed raw content (YouTube) How do you guys see this? Model media companies / org -> The Economist -> Quanta Magazine -> WSJ -> ft.com -> bloomberg Model content platform -> Product Hunt -> Reddit -> Quora -> Stackoverflow Other open media platform -> FB / instagram / youtube and the likes where people can openly / freely share stuff without targeted topics. Quick stat - grew >7x follower in <12 months on Instagram (@esenmedical) - https://instagram.com/esenmedical Shawn Co-founder @ĒSEN

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Alice Rodgers
I've seen a lot of examples turning personal brand and expertise into a profitable business (info-business, coaching, or consumer products) also, some big telegram channel owners take money for ads)
Abderisak
It is definitely possible to turn a large social media following to a business, but it's not as easy as it sounds. There are several celebrities with large followings that have launched services, apps other or products that have completely failed. The importance of nailing product-market fit can't be understated, even if you already have access to distribution and a large following. Perhaps one of the biggest examples of this is Google+ which completely failed despite the enormous amounts of users and leverage that they had access to.
Shawn Zou
@avidnote Hi Abderisak, this is very true. I cannot agree more. So instead of simply jumping into business / start developing, I'm trying to really think through the values that we can provide our readers / providers and doing a lot or research / surveys to understand how we can help them.