Before social media, businesses who wanted to advertise their products and services had to spend a fortune on billboards, newspaper ads, radio and eventually TV. But regardless of how much ads used to cost, they worked almost all of the time.

If you were an advertiser working for a company and you had money to spend, you would just pump it all into TV advertising or radio and though not being able to see directly how much of an effect you ads had on your viewers and listeners, the effect was almost always positive — even to the point of bringing in more money than was spent on the ads! When that started happening, you’d just buy more ads and it was a wonderful cycle for those who had the capital to burn.

But even though ads worked so well, advertisers still had to create ones that actually captivated people; a company manufacturing cars for example would have been insane not to base its ads on images of how the car looks, because mere writing (published in a newspaper) surely would not have had the same desired effect as a nice big billboard of a red 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle showing off its signature racing stripes.

While billboard ads are still expensive and TV commercials aren’t cheap either, the real gold mine for any one creative is social media; you might see Snapchat as just another app for people to be moronic and take pictures of themselves wearing dog ears, but there are many who used the app to exponentially grow their influence (were it not for Snapchat, DJ Khaled would probably never had become the superstar celebrity he is today).

And sure, many on such platform (especially the newer ones like music.ly) become stars overnight by being moronic or doing pranks, but these are always one of the first to try out new apps (think YouTube in 2006). Now we have such a wonderful gift that people in the 70s would only have dreamed about, we have the ability to advertise our creations for free; Facebook doesn’t cost a cent (not counting personal data — there is no free lunch), neither do Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it.

But I don’t mean paid ads, just the organic good old quality content we can create and share with our friends and potential customers. So why not take a moment and appreciate this (quite under-appreciated) opportunity and think of Andy Warhol, when he said: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” He dreamt about such a future, but we have the privilege of living in it. 

Why not get our 15 minutes?