You make a great point @davebrewer.
There is a great deal of truth to what you state. Steem has lagged behind BTC for the last 6 weeks...but is this different from any other alt coin. BTC is the grand daddy of them all and, contrary to what some of the naysayers spout, BTC will continue to get the lion's share of the money in this market and will take off. We are going to see $40K-$50K Bitcoin and nothing is going to compare to that.
That said, there is hope for STEEM and steemit really isnt the only game in town. Personally, I am super excited about zappl and think it can pull over millions of users ultimately. I think that is what needs promoting, not steemit. It is a much easier conversion since the interface is simply like twitter. Plus the fact that people can make some money off their "tweets" means that it is an easy draw away from twitter.
The challenge that steemit has is that it is not in facebook's league....it is far scaled down from that in terms of features. It really is closer to Reddit than facebook, something few really want to admit. Without a great deal of features added, it wont pull the FB crown over.
Taking over FB crown doesn't ever seem even realistic. Being as good as reddit would be an aspiration that steemit could aspire to, but it is far short currently.