After blogging on steemit for a while, you probably found it is quite different from other social media in terms of post reach. Let's try to see how it works in today's steemit in a minute.

Before we analyse post reach on steemit, let's refresh our memory about what is organic reach in other social media.

Organic reach on facebook

According to wikipedia, the definition of organic reach on facebook is:

This type of reach regards the number of distinct users that have seen a specific post on their feed.

Facebook has been developed and evolved for a long time. There are many ways that your post can be seen by others. For example, your friends, users who join the same facebook group, users who like your facebook page...etc.

The way your post ordered in their feed is called the feed algorithm. Although facebook fine tune this algorithm from time to time, some simple rules have always been effective such as how people react to your post in the past, how many likes / comments / shares did you get. All these added up to give you a higher ranking in the their feed order.

Organic reach on steemit

If you tried to search "steemit organic reach" on google, you will find there are not much information related to this topic. To have more idea about how your steemit post reach other steemians, one way is to analyse the source code on github, or the other is to analyse by observation.

1 - My Feed

Once you were followed by someone, your post will theoretically appear in that someone's feed. By observation, steemit feed is simply ordered by post creation time with the newest on the top. Unlike facebook, you will see the same posts in the same order after refreshing your steemit feed.

• It is predictable and easy to understand.
• It can be overhauled by resteemed posts.
• For users who follow hundreds of authors, the chance of your post being seen is low.

2 - New

On the top main menu of steemit, click the New link and you will see all the newly created post. Once again, it is simply ordered by post creation time. If you refreshed the page rapidly, you will appreciate how many hard-working steemians out there creating posts.

• Your post can reach people who see this "New" page.
• Your post goes down very quickly. Normally, it gets mostly out of sight within a few minutes.
• The URL is https://steemit.com/created/

3 - Tags

On the left-hand side bar, there is a long list of common tags that steemians used to describe their posts. By adding relevant tags to your post, people who interested in that particular topic can be reached.

• The posts shown on Tag page depends on your current page. Here are some examples:
  On My Feed, the link is https://steemit.com/trending/tagname
  On Trending, the link is https://steemit.com/trending/tagname
  On New, the link is https://steemit.com/created/tagname
  On Hot, the link is https://steemit.com/hot/tagname
  On Promoted, the link is https://steemit.com/promoted/tagname

Out of above 5 pages, 4 are mostly ordered by $ value of the posts.

4 - Trending, Hot and Promoted

As the most prominent items on the main navigation bar, these three pages should theoretically have high hit rate. Trending is hotter than Hot. Promoted is a special page where your post will appear only if you pay to boost it.

By observation, the order of posts shown on Trending and Hot page mostly depend on the $ value of that post. Some other ordering criteria should be in place such as the time of post creation, but the exact rule cannot be verified without reviewing of the source code.

Conclusion

If you were a famous blogger with lots of loyal followers, there is not much for you to worry about post reach on steemit except your fans may also follow hundreds of other authors, who also resteem a lot to overhaul the feed.

i.e. The feed of your followers could be too long to read

If you got a good number of minnow friends on steemit who regularly upvote your post, say over a hundred of votes, their minnow power may only drive the value up to less than a dollar in most cases.

i.e. The vast majority of posts may never get on Trending and Hot page

There are probably hundreds of new posts created on steemit per minute. The time your post stay within viewable page length is very little.

i.e. The New page is overhauled by new posts from time to time

For each post, it is limited to 5 tags. Even if someone click on the tag, the tag page is also ordered by $ value of the post. This is the same situation as Trending and Hot above.

i.e. Tagging may not help post exposure effectively

Last but not least, the order of your post in the feed seems not related to how popular your previous posts were. There seems not accumulated advantage of upvote and comment. Every new post is a new post counting from zero.

After all, it is not the end of the world. I know many of us, including myself, enjoy staying on steemit because of the community. Therefore, creating meaningful original content and talking to real people are the key values of being here. Spamming of useless content should get a very low, if not zero, chance of success.

Thank you for reading.