There are a myriad of unique challenges that appear when you start to develop a community online. From the outside looking in, it might appear to just be new, exciting, and pure fun. And, admittedly, it is all of those things. But it's not only those things. The Digital Community Developer must also tackle the dreaded social media monster.
This past week, we randomly had one of our TikTok's pop off and gather quite the audience—amassing 4,500 views and over 600 likes in the matter of 24 hours. In the scheme of the algorithm, this is a humble explosion, but nothing to shake a stick at. Here is the real challenge of the beast: it's very exciting. Having something explode in popularity makes the other pieces of content pale in comparison. The temptation of comparison is a bitter one and it sneaks in on you during your best times.
As a content creator, I'm proud of all of the work that I put out there. I'm always nervous, but excited to hit publish. But I'm not perfect—I want every video to be just as well, if not better, received than our TikTok last week. Most won't. Some will. Nevertheless, it's vital to maintain a sense of focus and keep our eyes on what we're doing here. Should we pull our resources from everything we're doing to focus on TikTok alone? Of course not, but it's a temptation. We can't pretend that it isn't. We have to look the monster in the mouth and decide to tell it a bold, declarative no.
We aren't married to anything but Jesus here at Checkpoint. Our current goals are to reach people via Twitch, build community of Discord, and learn through YouTube. Could those change? Sure. But no matter how viral a video might be on any social media platform, we won't make decisions like that without serious consideration. Fortunately, we worship a God bigger than the algorithm.