How much does your follower count actually matter?
So one of the (admittedly)frustrating things about my 2 months here on Steemit is the people who follow me (or lack thereof). Maybe this is a form of survivorship bias(in that I'm only looking at people who have more followers than me), but it feels like everybody who joined at the same time as I did seems to now have many more followers than me.
I think the payouts certainly one of the important things, and not just for those who are in it for the money. Even if you aren't doing it for the money, your visibility on this platform really depends on the amount of SP you have. Those who have thousands of SP, people will follow them just to have a chance to comment on their posts(in hopes of that comment getting upvoted by the high-SP user). And of course, if you have more followers, you get more upvotes, which might get you paid more(depending on the value of those upvotes).
So it seems once they have some initial success, it seems that people just spiral upwards. It's like a fucking star. Once you reach critical mass, you become bigger just because you are already bigger than others. In that sense, Steemit is actually pretty similar to other mainstream social media websites.
"Steemit is already too mainstream and therefore it sucks!! We should move somewhere else!!"
"Wait-what? We aren't like Reddit, and actually want to become mainstream? Oh..."
Of course, I've seen accounts that have 1000s of followers, but will only get dozens of votes. So the follower count is not always the best measure of engagement. But still,I think there's an instinct in everyone, to compare the 2 numbers and make an assumption based just on that one comparison. So the question is, how correct is that assumption?
If your followers aren't upvoting/commenting your posts, that's going to be a problem too...
And this is something that I was really curious about. How many of the people that follow me actually upvote my posts? How many of them upvote them twice? What about just everyone(follower, or otherwise) who upvotes my posts? How many of them have upvoted me more than once?
So I looked around for websites/apps that gave me this information. There are a few resources, like steemreports or steemnow, but I never really found any of the information I was looking for. Things like steemreports helps, but I don't think it tells you a lot about followers.
So I wrote my own script, using the steem-python library.
Here's a link to the script, in case anyone else also wants to look at this data for their own accounts:
https://gist.github.com/harshallele/f5a7c98fa27fd0a5e2c5438c3b56924b
(It's pretty hastily written, some of the variable names are confusing, and if you are a whale, it can take 5-7 minutes to complete. Also, this doesn't look at comments, but I intend to add that code soonTM)
And here are the results for my own account...
When I saw the number of followers that had upvoted in the last 30 days...
So as you can see, that follower number wasn't really that indicative of the no of votes I was getting. The vast majority of people who vote my posts are "drive-by traffic". They vote for one or 2 posts, and then never look at my content.Now just to be clear, this isn't a rant about not having followers, and certainly not a post begging for people to follow/upvote me.. I definitely have a lot to improve, like the amount of posts I make(I've been trying to post everyday, but as you can see, I haven't succeeded), or even just the number of comments I make on other posts(again, trying to improve that). But the stats have certainly made me junk some of my assumptions about the numbers.
And obviously, it's not the same for every account. I've run it on a few other accounts, and they had 50+% of their followers upvoting.So obviously, this can vary wildly between accounts. I think the important point, is to find this out for yourself.Don't make assumptions without looking at the data.
And this doesn't factor in the fact that votes are weighted, which makes it even more complicated
So how much does follower count matter?
Well, I think the answer is that it matters differently for every account - and you won't know how much it matters for your account until you find out.
Anyway, that's it.Thank you for reading this post. I would love to see people's thoughts on follower counts in the comments.
And for the 229 people who have upvoted me but not followed me,
This is great research! I'm building an app right now that shows you who interacted with you the most, how much upvotes and comments you got from them, and also which followers never interact with you.
It's still in beta but we can still use beta testers and more feedback so if you want to try it out check @spectacles latest post :)
Thanks for letting me know about this, looks great!
Left a message in the #spectacles channel in steemit.chat, I'd love to be a beta tester :-)
Followers who actively vote and comment on your post are the best. It is also important to interact which those who vote or comment on your post so that you can convert them into your followers. I also up-vote comments for my post regularly.
Yeah lol I guess that's the one advantage of being small-you can engage with everyone. You can't really reply to all comments when you have 300 of them. Anyways, thanks for reading :-)
I tried to reply to all the comments I received. Check out my post on Trans Mongolia Adventure.
Trans-Mongolia Adventure : Frolicking In Idyllic Village Of Khuzir
Follower count does not matter but in that who all are active does matter, because then only you will get to know the power of followers.
yeah i think active followers are what matters. But a lot of people have their follower counts inflated by bots or by people who're doing follow-for-follow.
Yes that's true, even the people follow someone you will not able to find out the post if you are coming after 10-12 hours. Just thing you have followed 200 people and everyone post in that 10-12 hours, you have to literally go through each and every post in your home tab to find out the best post.
Engagement is key if you decide to rely on building relationships in order to get regular upvotes from a set of people.
But the true key is being seen at the right time. People do not scroll through their feeds until they've seen all new posts. They scroll for 10 seconds and then leave the feed they're in. If you haven't been seen and haven't written a catchy title with a matching photo you won't get clicked on.
Visibility therefore is key, without flooding feeds with bad content.
I like your post, scrolled by it, decided to read it for some reason. I liked the fact hat you wrote a tool to get insights. The Steemit whales love this. Hope you get spotted by one. Might be best to improve your tool and write a new post about it.
Yeah being seen at the right time is key. A lot of the people say they're looking at New, but posts go down so fast on New that getting eyeballs is like winning the lottery-its entirely random
It really doesn't make much of a difference. Good followers matter and it's hard to know how many followers are good followers.
I mostly agree, but I think there's one advantag e to your followers being the bulk of your upvotes:
If your followers are upvoting you, wouldn't that make your upvote count(and by extension, payouts) more consistent? I mean, the hardest part of getting an upvote is actually getting seen, isn't it?
This is the thing, on steemit your upvote count gets you followers, not the other way around as it should be. People just chase money here at this point. We haven't grown large enough to get to the point where most people are just voting on stuff they like.
Tbh, the only way I see people voting on stuff they like is if the payouts go down significantly. And obviously, that won't be good either. Either that, or we have to become the next facebook, where people come just as a way to waste time. They aren't trying to make money. In contrast, there are many more people on Instagram/snapchat who are looking at it from a financial angle. And say what you want about Facebook, but they are pretty good at surviving.
Hi @harshallele, great post and very good work. I think engagement is even more important than followers. With engagement you will have automaticly more active followers.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by harshal from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews/crimsonclad, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
I break it all down to the simple fact that we are all existing in a perpetual state of information overload. Therefore, the key is to develop a STRATEGY to process all of the information coming at us. If you don't have a strategy you will wander around SteemIt aimlessly, and get frustrated often. In terms of following, my basic strategy is to upvote interesting individual posts, and then to take a quick browse of the other posts of that profile. If someone has been putting out NUMEROUS posts in line with my interests then I will usually follow them. After all, the whole point of following someone is that you want to read ADDITIONAL posts they put out which you PREDICT will be in line with your interests. Another tasks in my strategy is to check the "home" tab once daily. Whatever, and whoever, pops up with something interesting gets a read and (likely) an upvote (and possible ReSteem). With this basic strategy I make the information processing manageable and methodical. In this era of chaos I choose to make things as simple and organized as possible...
@tippy vote