Let's talk about how The Goldilocks Principle applies to Social Audio in several ways. We are mostly all familiar with the children’s bedtime story about Goldilocks and the Three Bears based on a 19th-century British fairy tale. Goldilocks is a small child who happens upon The Three Bears house and decides to make herself at home testing out their chairs, food, and beds before being discovered and later running away.
Let me share several variations on how the “Goldilocks Principle” applies to Social Audio.
In this issue will discuss:
• Big differences between the Top 5 Social Apps
• Building A Niche Community in Social Audio
• Recent Changes to Twitter Spaces Room Categories
Big differences between the Top 5
With the recent addition of LinkedIn Audio Events, we are starting to see the formation of a true Top 5 in the Social Audio marketplace. One reason I feel the top 5 will be dominated by big names is the size of their supporting networks. While Social Audio will likely be used by only a fraction of its userbase, we cannot ignore the fact that as the user base grows, so does the amount of users able to be a bigger part of Social Audio.
Clubhouse started in March 2020 with its introduction to Social Audio and later in the same year Twitter Spaces rolled out its own version of Social Audio with Twitter Spaces. LinkedIn also arrived on the scene in January 2022 with Live Audio Events and we know Amazon is working on Project Mic with an undetermined rollout date.
Here are some of the data about the size of their networks and just goes to show that we are just starting to see the possibilities with Social Audio. When these new apps and networks are fully released we will see a wave of new users looking to learn more about Social Audio.
Social Audio Users vs Platform Size Comparisons
• Clubhouse 30-40+Million users total
• Twitter Spaces (Twitter) - 330+Million monthly users
• LinkedIn Audio Events (LinkedIn) - 810+Million users total
• Facebook Live Audio (Facebook) - 1.93+ Billion daily users
• Project Mic (Amazon) - 15+ Million daily users on Twitch
So this leads to finding your perfect fit.
Clubhouse will continue to be great for authentic Social Audio conversations without other distractions and currently has a diversity of rooms and established clubs that have been around for over a year. Some clubs run daily rooms on a wide range of topics. You will find around 50-100 rooms running at any given time. To see the currently scheduled rooms visit RoomsofClubhouse.com.
More information on Clubhouse
Twitter Spaces and Twitter announced in November 2020 Twitter announces its social audio features, later called Twitter Spaces for iOS, and then with Android users in March 2021. Twitter Spaces is ideal for brands and those with an established follower base looking to grow. Social audio rooms in emerging markets such as NFT, Crypto, and Web3.0 are extremely popular. You will find around 200-300 rooms running at any given time. To see some of the room visit Spaces.bz or Find Spaces.
I would recommend signing up for the beta of Spaces Dashboard by following their Twitter. Andrew Lyons has been working to build the Ultimate Tool for discovering Twitter Spaces and tracking important details about your own Spaces.
More Info on Twitter Spaces
LinkedIn just introduced LinkedIn Live Audio Events and will be a great place for Social Audio Spaces on business and career development. They have introduced Linked In Audio Events in January 2022. Check out the Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Audio Events created by Judy Fox.
More Info on Linked In
Building a Niche Community in Social Audio
With so many different social audio apps available my view is that we should all be creating niche communities, growing together as a family with some accountability to one another. Instead of looking to form large groups, we should be looking to find our perfect fit.
How Goldilocks Principle Applies to Community Building
This is why creating niche communities with controlled growth is ultra-important, especially in 2022. Niche communities are groups of people who share a common interest and whose numbers are intentionally kept low in order to facilitate development. You should take the time to get to know each other more closely and discover more about your community in order to develop your core group.
Ultimately, we can and should help each other
We should be looking for ways to help each other to grow. We can do that by supporting each other’s audio spaces or rooms and retweeting and being a part of the conversation.
Create small goals to achieve together as a group
We are all good at something and we should look to find creative ways to help each other in that effort. Having some community goals allows you to share each other’s success and learn from things that do not go as well as planned. You can celebrate each other’s success and that collaboration will lead to more growth than originally planned.
Recent Changes to Twitter Spaces Categories
Twitter Spaces Room Categories have recently been updated but in my opinion, have created a new problem for themselves. When creating a Twitter Space hosts had the ability to add room categories to a room but the initial offering was just 10 very basic categories and hosts often complained about the lack of depth. This was recently replaced with a much larger category format but did away with the ability to select broader categories. We can now choose hundreds of very particular categories but cannot select generic categories.
A simple solution would be to add a Generic Category that would contain much broader subjects and likely be more widely used. I get the idea of trending topics, but this model suffers from the Goldilocks Principle as well.
I know the categories are in development and not fully released but as a host, these things can be frustrating. I believe Twitter Spaces is positioned to be a leader in Social Audio and hope they make this kind of changes before categories are released to the full audience.
Generic Category Suggestions
Sports, Gaming, Music, Live Music, Singing, Entertainment, Business, Marketing, NFT, Cryptocurrency, Entrepreneurship, Food, Technology, Storytelling, Fitness, Travel, Art, Culture, Recent News, Trending Topics, Outdoors, Careers, Networking, Fashion, Home, Parenting, Beauty, Family, Science, News, Interview, Podcast
What Categories would you like to see?