Tired of Main Stream Social Media? Looking for a Fresh Alternative.......

A few weeks back I came across steemit after once again becoming frustrated with FB and began looking for an alternative. I am not a big fan of FB however signed up for an account several years ago as it seemed a good way to keep in touch with friends. I grew up in Australia and New Zealand but have been away almost 15 years and am lucky enough to enjoy living in Puerto Vallarta Mexico.

Originally FB was a way for me to see what friends were up to and to post the odd photo of what I had been doing, also after discovering that it was possible to have private albums FB became a way for me to backup photos using FB's storage instead of paying for my Google Drive.
After having a girlfriend immerse my external storage drive in a bucket of water when she realised I had a life and memories before meeting her I decided I should follow the Backup Rule of Three

3 copies of anything you care about
2 different formats - Example: Dropbox+DVDs or Hard Drive+Memory Stick or CD+Crash Plan
1 off-site backup - If the house burns down, how will you get your memories back?
FB= free offsite storage for my photos, great :-) These days a paid account on Dropbox is much simpler way to sync everything.

In recent years however I have been learning how to do some online marketing as a sideline helping one of my clients promote their business. Posting to Craigs List, Kijiji and a like. Then moving into posting in Buy n Sell groups on FB, which are huge here in Mexico.
About 18 months ago while scanning through my spam folder I saw a product that looked interesting, reached out to the Chinese supplier and went through my standard inquisition before parting with my hard earned cash and ordered a sample.

The product was a 360º IP lightbulb security camera.
At the time they were fresh on the market.

My sample arrived and I put it though my standard tests, checking features, specs and of course taking it apart.
The product was good and I went through the process of type approval and getting permission to import the product into Mexico. Perhaps one day I will post about that procedure.... for now lets just say its a long winded process.
Created a brand name "FocoCam" and logo and then began to try and promote online.

With my limited budget and DIY attitude from down under I made some quick videos and banners etc and bagan posting away, mainly in buy n sell groups of FB. With a bit of effort I began was generating a descent amount of traffic and a hand full of sales. With the revenue from sales I decided to buy in and pay FB to promote my new product.
Starting with some simple campaigns targeting Mexico City my traffic went through the roof and my provider promptly shut my site down for using too many resources on the shared hosting plan......(this runs into another long winded story)

In any case I changed host and got my site back online and managed to make some sales.
Here in Mexico people are reluctant to purchase online due to trust issues and found most of my potential clients were asking where they could go to purchase this wonderful new product.
Initially my small budget was generating a lot of traffic and interest however not converting.
Deciding it was time to find distributors I bagan with mailing lists and meeting large retailers.
This assisted in introducing this new technology and creating competition for myself, the culture here is not shy to take your idea/product and cut you out....business is business I guess.

Luckily I listed on Amazon Mexico early with my own SKU and brand and have had slowly increasing sales there.
Initially paid and free FB advertising was doing well, driving customers to my online store where they can purchase direct or go to Amazon Mexico to purchase.
Then out of the blue, around August 2017 my traffic began to dry up.

I tried changing my paid ads, increasing budgets posting less to the groups but nothing seemed to work.
My paid budget was always maxed out but traffic was trickling in.
I observed my posts to groups were not shown and assume FB had kind of black listed me for spamming even though I was sticking within the guide lines and strictly posting to buy n sell groups, not spamming all over the place.
Since then I have tried the FB Market place and also had little to no result.
It could be that people are not interested in the products I am advertising but Mexico has a huge FB following and I have been advertising through out the whole country. Also my budget is tiny, so perhaps FB are not interested in my business??
I am sure something changed mid 2017 that effected my advertising so I gave up with FB and moved to Google Shopping.
This works but I am competing with all the large online retailers and my budget gets eaten up very quickly and I do not have the conversion rate to keep pouring money into the bucket.

Personally I have also become tired with FB and YT censoring content that is not inline with their political beliefs and pushing their agenda on me in my feed. For example, not been a fan of mainstream news I had liked RT and watch the odd article in my feed as I prefer their less biased style of reporting, around the same time my traffic dried up any alternative news source in my feed started appearing comments where trolls were claiming "fake" news constantly, scrolling down my feed there would be easily 20 comments about fake news every time I opened FB. This really annoyed me as I kept getting opinions from trolls with the words "fake" constantly appearing as if FB had decided it needed to tell me alternative news sources are fake.
I prefer to decide what I believe or interests me and what to ignore from both main stream and alternate news sources.

YT has increasingly become annoying with advertising busting into a video I am watching typically loud and content that is rarely relevant to me. Of course I understand platforms need to generate revenue to survive, targeting is something that I believe FB does well as far as delivering relevant adverts to my personal feed, retargeting can however get painful.

What am I looking for?? A platform that is not biased toward one political view or concept and not pushing an agenda down my throat, where people are free to express their opinions and were I am free to decide what is of interest to me and what is not.
I am also interested to find a way to market my products to people that might be interested, like most of us I also hate SPAM but I don't mind seeing dynamic advertising on the side that is tailored to my interests.

I am not sure if steemit will be a platform to assist my online marketing but I am very interested to see it become an established social media platform and the cryptocurrency attached to encourage quality content is a very interesting concept.

Perhaps I can come up with something interesting to post here from time to time and see where it goes ;-)
If you made it through my blurb, thanks for reading and happy steeming!

Saludos!