This weeks Journal entries will be asking about how Steemit is growing and who is coming here to determine who my audience will be as I carve out a niche in the Steemit ecosystem.

Steemit Communities and SMT

One pathway to Steemit success lies in developing a loyal follower base with which you can interact. Interaction should be rewarding for you and for your followers. This weeks Journal entries revolved around considering who is on Steemit, and how to define your identity in this space and bring value to your audience. This is part two in our 3 part reflection.

1. Steemit User Demographics and capacity for growth Read First Post.
2. How to build and connect with real followers. (Today's Journal Entry)
3. How to define blog identity that adds value to potential interests of current Steemit user base.

Today we are looking at two very exciting upcoming Steemit features that are going to change the landscape on interaction, reward and retention, Communities and SMT.

Steemit Communities

Originally described in the Steemit 2017 Roadmap, Communities offer much more flexibility and opportunities that the current simple tag structure. Reading the Community Spec Draft from GitHub gives us some insight into the early thinking about this feature:

The goal of the community feature is to empower users to create tighter groups and focus on what's important to them. For instance:

•   microblogging
•   link sharing
•   world news
•   curation guilds (cross-posting undervalued posts, overvalued posts, plagiarism, etc)
•   original photography
•   funny youtube videos
•   etc

Posts either "belong" to a single community, or are in the user's own blog (not in a community).

Now this is very exciting for anyone on Steemit hoping to create a community with which to interact on shared interests. One example is you could have a Community around Science Fiction Stories and within this community shared stories could be then tagged according to sub genre such as Space Opera, Distopia, Stempunk, etc. This becomes much more interesting for the members of the community.

Community discord channels could then be set up with general chat areas and in the case above, divided into sub-genres as well.

Being able to define a particular community and then cater to shared interests that can grow and change, will greatly help grow and retain faithful members.

SMT (Smart Media Tokens)

So once we have community groups, what is the 'magic bullet' for engaging and rewarding community participation? SMT will be a real GAME CHANGER!

Smart Media Tokens will allow Steemit content creators to mint their own crypto-coin for use in their own eco-system.

From the Steemit SMT Introduction, we can see several possibilities for community engagement and rewards:

1. Premium content could be offered at a price of community coins that have been earned.
2. Communities can have their own posting and content rewards.
3. Communities can have contests that reward winners using community currency.
4. Community currency could be used to purchase merch from the associated 'Gift Shop'

Just think about this for a few minutes and I'm sure you will come up with many additional ways in which SMT can be used.

When will we see these new features?

SMT Might actually show up before communities, as it is currently a part of Steemit update (Hard Fork) 21, which is in development. We are currently on Hard Fork 19, with 20 well in the works.

It looks like the goal is to have communities in by the end of the year, but this is only an educated guess, it could be sooner. Development is a tricky thing, especially with block-chain (more on this in another post).

So I'm very excited to see the planning that is going on to make Steemit the place it needs to be, including a goal to make the user registration process faster and easier I might add. I'm going to be ready with a strategy for implementing communities and SMT into my content creation as soon as it becomes available. 2018 is going to be a great year for Steemit!

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What do you think about the addition of communities and/or SMT? What are some good ideas for how these can be used? Let me know in the comments below, and I will respond to every one.

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Until next time my friends,

@phaazer1 [SquareLink]

If you can Dream it, you can Steem it.

Please add any questions, comments, or other ideas below, I would love to hear from you.
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