Steem post promotion: Past, present, and future

A reminder about Steem's "Promoted post" feature for authors and investors.

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Introduction

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, @steemitblog published the post Introducing Promoted Content, which introduced the notion of promoted posts to the Steem blockchain. In short, anyone can promote a post by sending some amount of SBD with an @author/permlink in the memo field to the @null account - effectively burning that amount of SBD, and the promoted post will appear in the /promoted feed. The posts in this feed are sorted by promotion amount, so the higher the transferred amount, the closer the post gets to the top of this list.

Unfortunately, curators in the past did not provide much support for this feature, and it fell out of use. Now, I guess it has been mostly forgotten by the current generation of Steemizens.

I was reminded of this, today because of the post Steemit Engagement Challenge Week # 4 | Propose A New Steemit Project| Steem Burn by @rosz. I didn't actually read the post, because of the language, but I hope I get the gist of it based on the comment from @steemcurator01:

Good idea.

You can actually burn STEEM by setting a beneficiary to @null.

Maybe we should encourage people to burn STEEM this way by giving more votes...?

Say 25% beneficiary to start.

#burnsteem25

Some months ago, I had tried to make use of the promotion feature, but failed. Apparently, I had forgotten exactly how the transfer had to be constructed and I wrongly concluded that the feature had been disabled. Today, though, I tracked down the original announcement and I was able to make use of it to promote two posts:

So the point of this post is to remind everyone of the existence of promoted posts, to point out how they can be useful to authors and investors, and to make some suggestions for improving the feature.

Promoted posts for authors

I suppose this is obvious, but it's a matter of visibility. If we have a new generation of curators who are committed to watching the /promoted feed, the author can increase their audience and their upvotes by making use of the feature.

At this moment, if someone wants to bump themself to the top of the feed, it will cost them 2.6 SBD. This is a clear benefit for any author who is trying to build an audience or communicate an important idea.

Promoted posts for investors

In short, using this feature requires authors or promoters to burn SBD. It's important to know that we can also promote posts by others.

We can see the importance of this by looking at how well the TRX token has held up in the current bear market for cryptocurrency. My strong suspicion is that this is - in large part - because of their token burning economics, which can be seen from tronscan.org:

From this, it seems clear to me that investors should encourage the burning of SBD through the use and expansion of the promoted post feature by authors, curators, and developers.

Improvements needed

Now, for the bad news. Promoted posts already fell out of use once, and there must have been a reason for that. In my opinion, the reason is that curators tend not to remember to follow a special link for promoted posts, and readers are especially unlikely to visit a list of sponsored content every day, so some improvements are definitely in order. What are they?

First and foremost, investors must see to it that curators are properly committed to supporting promoted posts (without compromising on quality standards). Curators will also need to figure out how to balance this with participation in other initiatives like club5050, etc...

In my opinion, a second key improvement would be to give prominent visibility to promoted posts by putting them in prime real estate on the Steemit.com web page and/or interleaving them into the various feeds.

Finally, developers of other Steem web sites could also dedicate a section of their screen real estate to displaying the promoted posts.

Ultimately (IMO), upvotes are nice, but the real purpose of post promotion should be audience building. So we should all find ways to help that happen.

Conclusion

In closing, I'm also in full support of the idea by @steemcurator01 to reward people for setting a benficiary through use of the @null beneficiary setting and #burnsteem25 tag, but I think we should also consider resurrecting the /promoted feed.

What do you think?

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.