By Commodore Trevor

As a marketer I spend a lot of time on different platforms and I get to spend a lot of time comparing features and advantages of each one. One of the features on Steemit that I find sorely lacking is the fact that figuring out who follows you is tough, and there are no notifications when you pick up a new follower.

What is the point of new follower notifications?

On other platforms I have found it highly useful to know who is following a brand and when the follow. When I see a notification of a new follower pop up I am immediately offered a link to that profile. More often than not I will pop over to that profile and take a glance at their content. Another useful feature I have found on Instagram is that it shows weather I already follow that person or not.

From that point I will often engage with their content or follow them back if I am not already following them. This also puts that person on my radar as someone who at least enjoys my brand's content enough to engage with them.

Why this matters?

From a social stand point I personally real like to know who engages with my content. On my personal feeds I find that when someone follows me I will generally click through to their profile and have a look at their content and I think that this goes for a lot of people. After all when someone wants to connect with you or otherwise wants to consume your content you naturally want to know if you have shared interests or connections. Thus, the social part of social media.

From a business perspective the easiest way that you can generate free and easy marketing exposure is to begin following people. This helps to build community for your brand and potentially expose people to your message. The key is developing a community around the content that your are engaged with. Without an obvious way of knowing who is engaging with your community and when it becomes very difficult to assess the success of any particular campaign. When you post something, someone sees it, engages with it, and immediately follows you there is a clear understanding that that person likes what you just said. If you know messages of a particular type helps to develop community bonds then you can tailor your message in specific ways.

Our strategies are 3 fold on most of our social media accounts:

1. Posts about Raft Racing
2. Posts about expeditions
3. Places of interest to people wanting to raft

We have found that each of these types of posts caters to a different audience and community with different followers engaging. We take note of the pillars of the community who engage with each type of content. Then we go to work with each post sharing each different type of content with these pillars of our community. This allows us to leverage their social networks to help bring people together. Knowing who engages with the content is built into steemit, but knowing who follows after a post can be critical. This is especially true if you are doing a dedicated follower campaign. With a follower campaign the longer the time interval that it is between when you follow someone and they see that you followed them the less likey it is that they will follow you back.

*source: John Lou Tang social media study

What we can do to improve Steemit

The easiest suggestion would be to add a notification like the feed notification over the image in the top right that will show that you have a follower notification. Perhaps a follower link could be added to the drop down with an additional notification block appearing in a different color, green for example, with the notification that you have a new follower. Having the option to quickly see who followed you would allow brands, weather business or personal, to quickly and easily engage with new followers to see who really enjoys your content. YouTube accomplishes this like this:

I don't know if this has been discussed in any upcoming Hardforks or by @ned and the dev team, but I would be interested to know if that is on the table if anyone has any insight. From a marketing standpoint I feel it would definitely help internally to build more engagement among users.

One case in point is that while writing this post I gained 1 follower, however I have no idea who that user is, and more importantly I would really like to know so that I can look at their content, say Hi, potentially follow them back, and just thank them for following me.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Would this help? Would you find it spammy? Do you feel like this would increase spam?

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