It should come as no surprise that living in a digital era, where more users are online than ever before, brands and businesses are dedicating more time and budget towards promotion, content creation and advertising on social media. Companies need to head to where the customers are spending their time, and it quickly becomes a winner take for a market if others don’t come in and compete. If you abstain from social media and your competitors don’t, they can reach more users at a lower cost per view and, eventually, cost per lead.
This need to compete for eyeballs online to keep your business going creates an endless supply of content for social media platforms and a competitive ad bidding network responsible for a profitable revenue stream. Brands that do not embrace being online risk being overlooked by customers, while those that do are fighting it out for a smaller sliver of the pie year after year. Since social media platforms became the gatekeepers, they provide limited access to their user base with the incentive to push you towards paid promotion.
While you might have built up a following, you do not have direct access to them, and you’re at the mercy of social media feed preferences and algorithmic curation.
Suppose you have a business and are building your brand and marketing on social media; you may have found that while crucial for communication and a customer engagement medium, social media platforms are not the lead generator it once was as ad tech took over news feeds.
If you’ve been promoting your business on social media for the last decade, you’ve probably seen lower returns from your organic efforts and a greater need to spend on social media ads to try and secure traffic and leads.
Social media is a serious business.
When brands are pitched about a new social media site, it’s often met with a resounding sigh, with questions regarding the validity of the platform and if it is really worth the time and effort to build up a presence on these sites. When businesses commit to a platform, they either need to allocate time, human resources or ad budget, which could have been spent on the more popular platforms.
Nostr is still in its early stages, which means most brands and businesses would ignore it. At the same time, those who get on the trend early could reap outsized reach in the future at a lower cost, similar to those brands that jumped on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok during their early days.
Nostrs’ primary function might seem to be an alternative to Twitter right now, but it has much more to offer than a social media copycat.
Nostr is not just another pet product for your social media manager to explore or something that should be outsourced to a social media agency. It’s a protocol that can be integrated into your online brand building in several ways.
If you’re wondering what Nost offers that could make it worthwhile, then here are some reasons why your business should consider being an early adopter of this new protocol and take advantage of the growth of this new form of social media.
1. Streamlined login/account creation.
The first benefit of adding Nostr support to your website would be the ability to reduce friction when creating an account with your service. Instead of asking people to provide another email and password or create a new username, they are likely to forget.
Brands can offer them a one-click sign-in, which they verify with their Nostr keys.
You can think of the experience to be similar to that of the sign-in with Google or Facebook options many sites offer today. The only difference is instead of requesting the user’s email address and adding it to your database, creating another possible honeypot for hackers, you’re only requesting a confirmation signature.
The user never has to pass over any data to you, and they can create and sign into accounts with one click. Think how powerful this becomes once you’ve built up a considerable following on Nostr and you’re driving regular traffic from clients to your website; eliminating these sign-in pain points would greatly reduce the path to sale and could increase conversion rates for user growth or sales.
2. User-generated content.
Today anyone can create content and publish it to different websites; it’s something we’ve all become accustomed to. Still, very few brands take full control over the possibilities because managing is simply too time-consuming and resource intensive.
Your customers and followers are your greatest source of feedback, and if you can tap into it, you can not only improve your reputation but create unique experiences that other brands do not offer.
If you offered nostr support on your website, you could use it to allow users to
- Post questions on the FAQ section of your site
- Submit posts to your site’s forum
- Rate and review products or services
- Provide testimonials
- Compete customer surveys
- Comment on blog articles
Instead of having to use third-party services like Disqus or Facebook comments for blog comments and Zendesk for FAQ and forum posting, you could consolidate it all into one user interface that communicates with your relay and allows any Nostr user to publish to the different user-generated content elements of your site.
3. Customer communication medium.
Social media platforms have become a way for customers to communicate with brands and vice versa using a public medium. Brands can share updates, warnings or general information, while customers can voice their concerns, their grievances or provide comments, constructive feedback and even compliments.
Brands can communicate with their followers either through posts or direct messaging without ever having to secure their personal information since all information is relayed between individuals using public and private key pairs.
This ensures private data does not need to be shared when communicating with one another and might provide a more welcoming space for those who would like to reach out to you but do not wish to divulge private information.
4. Promotion of your content.
Like any other social media platform Nostr allows you to promote your content. Still, instead of having it only seen on one platform, your feed is universally accessible to any client where the user follows you and has access to your relay or relays with your content.
Instead of having to deal with figuring out when to post, what hashtags to use based on user trends for the day, or trying to hop on the latest news or popular meme to try and get views, Nostr clients offer users unfiltered feeds in chronological order.
You no longer need to bend the knee to a specific social media platform and hope that they show your content to your followers; your followers will see your content as long as they follow you and remain active on a client. This makes building up a following a more attractive prospect since you now have a better chance of being seen simply through organic interaction with user feeds.
5. Building up direct contact with customers.
Before the proliferation of algorithmic curation across social media platforms, brands could reach their followers as long as the user remained a follower and maintained an interest in the content the business pushes out regularly.
As social media platforms began to put a chokehold on audience access, we’ve seen brands pivot to options like newsletters to try and maintain a direct relationship and have open lines of communication with interested parties.
While newsletters still have a place in the marketing mix, it doesn’t need to be the only way to build up a following you can reach on demand. Nostr offers you direct access to your followers without needing them to supply an email address or any personal information.
As you build up a list of accounts following you, you can reach them either by posting directly to their feeds or via bulk direct messaging.
6. Brand building and ambassadors
Nostr offers some rather unique opportunities for brands to support the ecosystem while getting their name out into the Nostr-sphere.
The first and most obvious method is the creation of a relay; this would allow you to house other people’s content for them, such as your customers and possible clients and use it as an olive branch or as an added benefit for being a customer or follower.
The second option would be to offer NIP05 verification as a service, allowing a Nostr user to claim a unique user handle with your domain attached to it. This can act as a brand-building technique, with followers of that user constantly seeing your domain and brand name featured on the different Nostr clients.
A third option would be to offer Lightning Addresses as a service; this could be done by creating a redirect on your domain. Users could claim a unique handle with your domain similar to that of a NIP 05 address, but this could be used as a method of routing Lightning network payments.
Do your own research.
If you’d like to try out Nostr or want to learn more about it, we recommend checking out the following resources to kickstart your research.
Are you on Nostr?
If you are a Nostr user and want to hang out and chat with us or follow our content on your preferred Nostr front end, feel free to add us using our PubKey below.
7ecd3fe6353ec4c53672793e81445c2a319ccf0a298a91d77adcfa386b52f30d
The Bitcoin Manual’s Nostr Pubkey
