New Steem bloggers always find it difficult to gain good followers. At the same time, everyone is obsessed with the number of followers they have. Follower count is a good measure of popularity but it's misleading as a measure of value exchange.

Image Credit

Having 50 good followers is much better than 500 bad ones. That's a truth I have come to realize. Let me explain.

Good Followers

By good followers, I mean followers who fall into one of these categories.

Image Credit

A follower who is growing

Steemians who are committed to Steemit and engage with the community are valuable as your followers since such followers are more likely to grow themselves and as a result, their upvotes' worth should also increase over time.

A follower who is interested in what you blog about

A follower who leaves good comments and upvotes with some regularity, that is, a follower who is interested in what you write about and can potentially give you many upvotes in the months and years to come if you ensure the quality of your blogging.

A follower who is a whale or a dolphin

This one is obvious as one vote from a whale or a few votes from a dolphin can earn the blogger significantly more than puny votes from tens or hundreds of minnows and planktons all put together.

Bad Followers

However, as it turns out, most of the followers you get are not as good. There's really not much value in gaining such followers. Here are some types of followers which you do not want and are best avoided if possible.

Image Credit

Upvote leeches

These people follow you only because they think you will upvote their shitty meaningless comments.

Follow for follow imbeciles

These are the ones who think just following as many Steemians as possible will give them enough number of followers to earn them some good amount of upvotes. The problem with these people is that their own feed streams are always so full of posts from hundreds and thousands of bloggers that they will never notice your posts, leave alone reading, commenting and upvoting them.

Resteem spammers

These are followers who resteem whatever post they find, left right and center. Resteem is a valuable tool and should be used wisely only when you find a post worthy of sharing and which adds value to the blogger as well as to your followers. Habitual resteemers add value to no one and they are followed by no serious Steemian. Nobody likes a feed spammed by so many resteems.

Follow and vanish

I don't know what to say about these. They follow someone, I don't know why, and then they vanish from the face of the planet never to come back and read the posts or engage in the discussions. They remain an enigma, a mystery if you wish.

So what kind of followers do you want?

I don't think it's such a hard choice.

But what kind of a follower are you?

I think this is an important question each Steemian should ask oneself, as that is what will help each one of us improve and in turn improve the platform.

Referral Links

Sell Votes on SmartSteem

Get Followers and Upvotes on SteemFollower

Get Free Crypto Coins

Image Credit

Click on the banners to learn more about each community