Most of us are getting woke. We’re in full swing on storytelling. I get it. There’s such glamour with all the good stories that we share. Stories that resonate with us. Stories that share the realities of Basotho.
These stories depict a clear reflection of our environment. Our job market, our business environment, our struggles, and stories worth celebrating.
However we’ve fallen into the trap of Facebook being ‘our internet’. Nothing bad about that. We’re able to run e-commerce activities on there, run our organizations and clubs and there’s almost a group for whatever you can possibly think of.
But we’re limited. While we share all these stories, they are only seen by our Facebook connections and read by the circle we associate with. In some way, this is good because we already have an audience in place.
However, our stories don’t persist through. Within a couple of days, they’re gone down the timeline. What I valued today is long gone down someone’s timeline. Unless of course I had saved it.
It’s odd we haven’t got to the point of using Notes on Facebook which would actually deliver in a far much better way.
Lately we’ve even deciphered a way to let our readers know we’re about to share a lengthy message – ‘Long post alert!‘ Instead, we should move our focus to platforms that support long form content.
We sure got a bigger fish to fry.
One of our big focus areas in 2018 is to profile even more start-ups, individuals and businesses doing great exploits in our community. With that comes storytelling and to bring in more writers to share their stories and stories they find exciting and are willing to share with our online community.
But we would also love to publish all the valuable local content shared via Facebook.
Most importantly, we all need to diversify and explore other platforms. We need to utilize publishing platforms. One of the best platforms I recommend is Medium. Medium is a place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most.
While we retain our audience on Facebook, we could write our stories on Medium and simply share them through Facebook. Medium allows for a better categorization of content. The professional possibilities that publishing platforms bring are worth exploring.
In the end, our target should be to push more local stories to the web and not only Facebook. We need to move beyond storytelling and focus on building platforms that push more local content and tell our stories.