The quick answer is 3 years. We managed to do it for ourselves in about 1.5 years. Some people with high ticket items can take up to 5 years.
How long did others take?
The best case study is to look at the journey of those on Youtube. How long did it take them to start showing results? and when was the time it was good enough for others to be jealous? The journey of those on Youtube, Facebook, Google or any other social media website follows a similar story.
Those who join, usually is because of an interest, and is non-commercial in nature. They do not expect any kind of returns other than the attention and interaction. After 2 years, they begin to be approached by sponsors which will pay them a fee for reviewing their product/service. While this is nice, it does not pay well enough to justify those hours spent on the social media platform. Only after 4-5 years, it becomes obvious that their investment was the right choice.
At the end of 5 years, this is how it looks like. Regular organic (non-paid) posts attract new interest and leads. Advertisement also show amazing ROAS. Sponsors flow in regularly without promotion. This result “belongs” to them. If I were to start anew and to post exactly what they did, I will not get the same result. This is because those who responded, actually already followed them for 5 years! But those who run advertisements, attribute the result incorrectly to the ad platform (facebook/youtube/Tiktok) or ad creative (the ad video or landing page). any move they make looks attractively positive. New comers try to take a short, and then blame the incompetency of the ad team for producing much worse results. New comers were doomed to fail.
why should we invest the time and money? of 5 years?
there are 2 ways to look at it.
1 – you really don’t have any other choice. maybe you could choose facebook/google/youtube/tiktok. but the story is all the same
2 – actually there is another option, and that is advertisement. most people find this attractive because of its immediate returns. When done in the infancy of the platform, they can usually produce great results because the traffic is so cheap. and then it dies down as the price goes up and competition comes in. For more information on running advertisements, click here.
is it worth it?
If you are going into it with a commercial interest like me… It definitely does not feel that way during the first year. Only at the end of the first year, did we start to receive commercial interest in the form of clients and sponsorships. and i would take
I believe that this longer-than-expected investment period has been a barrier to many businesses. Those who are willing to invest, typically has a 3-6 month return expectation. They are already considered “risk lovers and forward-thinking” among their friends. Most will not even try. Those who try will be disappointed. They like to refer to top examples like Nas Daily or Sgag and quote the short 6-12month period. I prefer to look at the “above average/good/very good” group which will take about 2-3 years on Tiktok.
Those who are successful on social media, did not enter with a commercial interest at the beginning. This makes sense. Why would anyone continue to invest after 6 months when it’s not positive? Most of my friend’s and my business either took off within 6 months, or it didn’t at all. most people would not even wait 2 months to call it quits. This is reflected in the way Tiktok manages their creators. At the start when they created their support group sometime in 2018, it was mainly based on interests. I tried to figure out their commercial interests, but could not find any. I believe they acquired musical.ly for 1 billion with a commercial intention back in November 2017. But they did not begin monetisation operations until about December 2020 (unfortunately there is no online evidence of monetisation until around Dec 2021). That is about 3-4 years. I believe this was part of the plan. Tiktok is not their first app. They have other similar apps like Douyin or xigua with similar trajectory. you can check out their products here.
why did we choose to go this way then?
Creating organic content was not our first choice. The first time we were presented with such an option was much earlier on around 2010. back then those who created content was not the cool thing yet. we went with advertising because it could scale very quickly. there was this dream where they say if you could spent $10 and get $100, then you can spend $1000 for $10,000. Those who actually did turn up the spend to $1000/day did not receive $10,000. They get maybe $3000. There is diminishing returns as the spend goes up. But the promise is very sexy, we tried to chase this dream from about 2010 to 2018. After seeing it fail in front of our eyes on newspapers, website pop up traffic, Facebook, Google and Youtube, we realised the winners were the content creators we saw back in 2010. We had the opportunity many times, but we chose advertising 5 times. This was also when we realised the presence of these creators. While they were there all along, their presence did not catch our attention.
In 2018, I decided i was not going to repeat the mistake the 6th time. This is when we tried to create content on a mix of platforms like Facebook, Website, Youtube before stumbling on Tiktok in July 2020. To find out why we think Tiktok is worth the investment, click here. (assuming you have already committed to invest 3 years of resources somewhere)
Of course i could have decided to go for the newest ad platform (for the 6th try). we had the knowledge and expertise to access Tiktok ads platform globally (not in singapore as it was only launched in June 2021). We can manage the product sourcing, marketing, warehousing, fulfilment and customer service (click here for more about our e-commerce experience here). And we could have created a lot of ads. In fact, that was what other people did exactly. And i believe they made a tonne of money. I felt like an idiot, contributing to videos and engaging the community for an ongoing full year, while my peers are making bank. The natural forces soon kicked in (although it took a year), and most of my peers were “priced out” just like before. I believe they have already moved on to a new ads platform.
We on the other hand, can now advertise freely on the Tiktok platform, because we have built a loyal following. They are not watching us for the first time. They have seen our videos before for the last 2 years, and only now have we offered an opportunity to connect. These leads are not on the open market for bidding, it only belongs to us. Good things come to those who wait.
The start of the journey of building a social media brand
In Jan 2018, we decided to bet all our money and life (for 2 years) on building online assets on a welcoming social platform. We realised it was Tiktok in July 2020. While the account started in July 2020, the commitment started from Jan 2018. The obvious take off point would be when Tiktok appeared on the news as the most downloaded/viewed/used app. Clients started to look for us, and with a lot more keen interest than ever before. That would be around 1.5 years on tiktok, and 3 years for this whole “project” to REALLY TAKE OFF. It could have ended up somewhere else in another social media platform like likee or bigo, i believe the result would have been similar.
So what is happening during this 3 years?
Social media is about relationships, and relationships takes time to build. You don’t trust and buy a big ticket item from someone on day 1. You will want to see them around for a while, doing something meaningful and value adding to you. You are not actively looking out for them, so maybe they only come across you about once every 2-3 weeks (if you are trying really hard). While the old traditional rule says 7 touch points is need, that is the physical requirement. The online equivalent would be maybe 50+ touch points.
How long do you need to know the other person before committing to marriage? the bare minimum would be 6 months. and that is already considered very very fast. The typical relationship that gets married is at least 2-3 years, mostly above that. Work and social media is like a marriage. Do you spend more time on work or more time with your spouse?
I don’t know how you are going to keep this going until 3 years. Let me know if you find a way.