Do Followers Really Mean Anything?

I remember when I started on Steemit and had my first 50 followers. And today it says that I have a 1000. WoW! 🙄

Let's talk about this subject: followers. What does that really mean?

I mean, let's face it: I am not really having a 1000 followers. A common statistic says that only about 10% actively follow your content. Which means that about 100 people are looking at my posts. Is that likely? Probably not; I dare say that it is maybe 10 - so that would be about 1% (I am basing this assumption on the fact that most of my posts only receive between 10 and 20 upvotes).

Another question you have to ask is what it means psychologically to have followers. You might feel good because you think that somebody is reading your content. Which is okay, of course, but you should be weary about being driven by that feeling of only getting more and more followers.

A question you should maybe be asking yourself is if you are making content to see that number go up or are you making content because you are genuinely trying to make good content? If it is the second reason then you are on the right path 👍

Getting followers should therefore be more of an organic process; by creating good content you get more people interested in that content and thereby increasing your follower base. I mean don't get me wrong, of course it isn't bad to get more followers, but getting followers should not be an end to itself.

You should definitely be cautious and not get carried away and get caught in the follower illusion: a growing number of followers might suggest that your content is getting better and better. In fact, it might not actually. And because we are on steemit, followers (at least in the past) were often very much fake.. I am not sure if that follower problem has been alleviated on steemit (I hope!), but it is one of many reasons that you should not get carried away by that follower number.

You might also ask yourself about what kind of relationship you have with your followers. Are you thinking of them as people who are looking to you as a leader, almost like in a cult? I don't really like the word follower for that reason: it suggests that we are following (blindly) people who wield power and influence over us (of course I think almost nobody thinks of it in this way). A better way of thinking about followers is that they are just people like yourself with similar interests and common outlooks from whom you can also learn from.

Perhaps the concept of followers could be replaced by a sort of score of how well connected one is with the community? Such a score could perhaps more accurately reflect one's position on the platform and his or her relevance within it.