Following Followers or Followers Following That Is The Question?
I'm a week in to my Steemit journey and I've been thinking about a follower strategy. Lets face it the community is great, and i'm learning lots of great stuff, but the reason that a majority of us are here is to earn some money am I right?
I think its also fairly safe to say that Steemit want us all to be here for the long term and to produce quality content.
With that in mind I think that there can only be one possible follower strategy.... and that's don't go looking for followers let them find you through your content.
Now initially I have gone and followed a bunch of folk's who's content looks of interest to me, around 100 or so. Now each day I've checked my feeds and I have made an effort to comment on posts in my feed. However the same does not seem to be true of my followers? Now this just may be that the folks I've followed have just followed me back and don't find my posts that interesting.
Now I have tried to find out where my followers have come from and it looks like that almost 80% of my followers i'm also following. So it does seem that when you follow someone that for what ever reason they follow you back. As I've already mentioned i'm not getting that many comments and up votes. Ok its early days I hear you say but I does look like followers who are simply following me because i'm followed them, and that's never going to build a loyal engaged audience that can produce a sustainable income.
So I guess i'm saying that from now on i'm simply going to build my followers from my content. I'm not going to follow anyone just for the sake of it in the hope of a return follow because that's never going to work long term.
As proof of my concept I went and had a look at some of the big whale accounts and a vast majority have thousands of followers but follow very little back.
Now that being said I have also notice several accounts that have almost as many followers as they are following. There post also often produce $1000's dollars in votes. Which leads me to think that either they have applied the i'll follow you, you follow me strategy or they already had an audience that they invited to Steemit and legitimately do like following a large amount of accounts!
I would really love to hear from the community and more importantly any of my current followers as to why they like following me?
My take is: if I produce the great content without having a sizable follower base, my goal of earning the money is defeated. I saw a guy that follows over 2000 people and followers of about 500+. The strategy appears too cheap but it works, atleast for starter minows. So I use the F4F strategy for now, while working on my great content. Win win.
For me i dont know why i follow the people that follow me. At first i follow them or they follow me and i return the favor, but now i dont follow anyone anymore.
Hiya, just came across your blog, and to answer your question as why I follow you, coz I'm following a fellow brit who happens to work in IT like i used to do 😀
i nearly always follow back people who follow me, afterall if someone bought you a drink it would only be polite to buy the second round. There are so many blogs out there so its nice to read random stuff that i didnt chose, you never know what you may stumble upon. And ive had some nice surprises.
The problem with not following people, like sometimes i see people with say 100 followers but they only follow say 10, i see that as all take and no give. If people are supporting you, then why not give back to the community because everyone needs some support.
On the other, that doesnt mean i go crazy and follow everyone in the hope of getting return follows as thats a bit pointless. Im doing an experiment at the moment and trying to reach at least more than 40% follow back.
Great reply. I really like your idea of trying to keep follow backs at 40% . I also see that people leave a lot of comments but don't often upvote? I suppose that you don't have to upvote the post to comment but i tend to, but that's just me.
I normally upvote and comment because if a post is worth me commenting its worth me upvoting. Though sometimes i forget after i comment as you may have realised by now😀
Hi mate, just keep posting good content and you'll pick up the right sort of followers. I think, in the last week or so, a glitch has affected the post notifications on people's feed so they are not getting notified you've posted. I think it's had an affect on everyone to be honest. Just post good content mate, you'll be right.