Dr Bar­ney Pacheco

The fol­low­ing guide is in­tend­ed to aid read­ers in analysing the case prof­it­ing from so­cial me­dia. When analysing a case, re­mem­ber that there are many pos­si­ble ap­proach­es and so­lu­tions and the goal is to de­vel­op your an­a­lyt­i­cal and prob­lem-solv­ing skills rather than fig­ure out "the one right an­swer."

Syn­op­sis

Paula Drakes cre­at­ed a YouTube chan­nel three years ago and start­ed post­ing videos about how to cro­chet ba­by items as a way to share this dy­ing craft with a wider au­di­ence in the hopes that oth­ers might be at­tract­ed to a hob­by that she was pas­sion­ate about.

The re­sponse to Paula's videos was very en­thu­si­as­tic and she quick­ly be­gan at­tract­ing a loy­al fol­low­ing. This led her to join YouTube's Part­ner pro­gramme which not on­ly al­lowed Paula to gen­er­ate in­come from her videos but al­so ac­cess a set of tools to track her au­di­ence and man­age the per­for­mance of her videos.

Achiev­ing a per­son­al mile­stone of at­tract­ing 1,000,000 view­ers to her videos had plant­ed the idea that she could turn her hob­by in­to a ca­reer. An ar­ti­cle she had read about oth­er en­tre­pre­neurs who earned mil­lions of dol­lars an­nu­al­ly from their YouTube chan­nels in­spired her to se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­er quit­ting her job and fo­cus­ing on mak­ing home videos.

The ma­jor ques­tion in her mind, how­ev­er, was did she have what it takes to be­come a YouTube star?

Case analy­sis

Q1. What fac­tors have con­tributed to Paula's suc­cess?

A key con­trib­u­tor to Paula's suc­cess is the fact that she iden­ti­fied a niche au­di­ence whose needs were not be­ing ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed. Con­tent reigns supreme on so­cial me­dia in terms of at­tract­ing at­ten­tion and cre­at­ing pos­i­tive word of mouth.

The fre­quen­cy of her posts there­fore guar­an­teed that vis­i­tors to her chan­nel would find new and in­ter­est­ing ma­te­r­i­al on a reg­u­lar ba­sis, which in­creased the like­li­hood that they would be­come sub­scribers to her chan­nel.

The qual­i­ty of the videos that Paula up­loaded not on­ly dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed her from oth­er posters but made it more like­ly that mem­bers of her brand com­mu­ni­ty would share that con­tent with their so­cial cir­cles.

Paula al­so ac­tive­ly en­gaged with her au­di­ence and demon­strat­ed that she was in­ter­est­ed in the feed­back that they pro­vid­ed.

Pro­vid­ing per­son­al feed­back to ques­tions and cre­at­ing videos based on view­er feed­back sig­nalled her com­mit­ment to fos­ter­ing a ful­fill­ing di­a­logue with her au­di­ence. This cre­at­ed a sense of fa­mil­iar­i­ty and in­ti­ma­cy be­tween the view­er and con­tent provider which kept en­gage­ment lev­els high and gen­er­at­ed re­peat vis­its to her YouTube Chan­nel. Con­nect­ing with her com­mu­ni­ty was thus vi­tal to in­creas­ing the size of her au­di­ence.

An­oth­er im­por­tant strat­e­gy was her de­ci­sion to lever­age the pow­er of oth­er so­cial net­work­ing sites to pro­mote her chan­nel and raise the vis­i­bil­i­ty of her con­tent.

By shar­ing links to her video on oth­er sites such as Face­book, she in­creased the chance of the video get­ting no­ticed and at­tract­ing view­ers to her YouTube chan­nel. She al­so care­ful­ly chose de­scrip­tions and tags for her videos which made them eas­i­er to find when vis­i­tors con­duct­ed a gen­er­al search on YouTube for videos on cro­chet­ing.

Paula's suc­cess can al­so be at­trib­uted to her use of an­a­lyt­ics to bet­ter un­der­stand her au­di­ence and de­ter­mine what videos were most like­ly to be well re­ceived.

Mon­i­tor­ing the per­for­mance of her videos al­lowed her to tweak the type of video be­ing post­ed and ad­just her mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy to op­ti­mise her reach. At­tract­ing new sub­scribers and view­ers was vi­tal to en­sur­ing that she could earn suf­fi­cient rev­enue from her video posts.

A fi­nal fac­tor that can­not be over­looked is the pas­sion for her hob­by that Paula demon­strat­ed in her videos and the fact that she cre­at­ed an ap­peal­ing on­line per­sona as the star of her home movies.

While the con­tent of her videos could be copied by com­peti­tors it would be im­pos­si­ble to re­place the per­son­al­i­ty that was re­spon­si­ble for cre­at­ing a fun ex­cit­ing in­ter­ac­tion with the au­di­ence.

Paula's pre­vi­ous en­tre­pre­neur­ial ex­pe­ri­ence al­so was an as­set in prepar­ing her for the ef­fort re­quired to turn this new ven­ture in­to a suc­cess­ful busi­ness.

Q2. What strat­e­gy should Paula pur­sue in or­der to grow the busi­ness?

Paula's goal of con­vert­ing her YouTube posts in­to a full time ca­reer may be am­bi­tious but is cer­tain­ly not un­re­al­is­tic.

A num­ber of strate­gic op­tions are avail­able to her, each of which has risks as well as po­ten­tial re­wards. Paula has to recog­nise that while she has a loy­al fol­low­ing at the mo­ment, fame is fleet­ing in the dig­i­tal world and there are very low bar­ri­ers to en­try for ri­vals who wish to copy her busi­ness mod­el. This should prompt her to se­lect a strat­e­gy that not on­ly main­tains her ex­ist­ing brand com­mu­ni­ty but al­so ex­pands her cus­tomer base.

One op­tion is to open a phys­i­cal re­tail store where view­ers of her videos could pur­chase cro­chet prod­ucts. A ma­jor chal­lenge posed by this ap­proach would be man­ag­ing the lo­gis­tics in­volved in sup­ply­ing a glob­al clien­tele. Is­sues could al­so arise in stock­ing suf­fi­cient in­ven­to­ry to en­sure an ad­e­quate sup­ply of prod­uct in the event that lo­cal de­mand picks up.

At present, Paula views cro­chet­ing as a hob­by but a re­tail store might quick­ly strain her abil­i­ty to sup­ply the mar­ket and di­vert at­ten­tion from what made her suc­cess­ful in the first place. For these rea­sons this is not an at­trac­tive al­ter­na­tive.

An­oth­er op­tion is to pro­vide work­shops and in­di­vid­ual train­ing to sub­scribers of her YouTube chan­nel. While this is a nat­ur­al ex­ten­sion of what Paula cur­rent­ly does on­line, it would re­quire a con­sid­er­able in­vest­ment of time on her part and the con­cerns about her per­son­al safe­ty can­not be dis­missed.

The best op­tion ap­pears for Paula to ex­pand the scope of her videos to en­com­pass oth­er art forms which could com­ple­ment the ones that she al­ready makes. She could even lever­age her pre­vi­ous busi­ness for­ay and cre­ate videos about the process of mak­ing scent­ed can­dles. This is an area where she al­ready has the knowl­edge and skill and would al­low her to ex­pand the busi­ness at her own pace with­out re­quir­ing sig­nif­i­cant ad­di­tion­al re­sources.

Even­tu­al­ly, Paula might even be able to tran­si­tion the new videos to their own YouTube chan­nel and cre­ate a sec­ond source of rev­enue.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, mon­etis­ing so­cial me­dia re­quires a fe­ro­cious fo­cus on cre­at­ing high qual­i­ty con­tent as well as au­di­ence en­gage­ment. Once Paula over­comes the chal­lenge of get­ting peo­ple to watch her videos, she would be well on her way to achiev­ing her dream of be­com­ing a YouTube star.

Dr Bar­ney Pacheco is a lec­tur­er in the De­part­ment of Man­age­ment Stud­ies at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine