Every person on Steemit looks forward to gaining more followers. It's a common pursuit regardless of the number of followers already held or the level of user. While some rely on the quality of their content, many even run follow for follow campaigns to gain more followers. All in all, having more followers just feels right, doesn't it?
But is getting more Steemit followers a worthy goal?
Image designed via Canva.com and background image is free to use from the inbuilt gallery. The little folks are following their mama.
It's an important question that we are going to explore in this post. A mean of all opinions, including the content of this post and your comments under it, will give a way forward to have a common position on followers.
Are Followers Important?
If Steemit is a social media platform, followers are what we call the audience. Without any audience, there is no point sharing your opinions and thoughts. Just imagine a teacher teaching a class full of empty chairs. The whole activity is pointless.
So, having followers is not only good, it is necessary too. You don't want to throw your well created content into a vacuum. There needs to be an audience for you to send your message across. Since Steemit is an interaction based community, let's revisit our basic knowledge of communication skills.
Elements of Communication
For communication to happen, we need four things.
- Sender - The source of the message that needs to be delivered.
- Message - That is to be sent.
- Medium - The platform which enables communication.
- Receiver - The end consumer of content of the message.
Let's view communication in terms of Steemit.
- Bloggers are senders.
- Blog posts and comments are the message.
- Steemit is the medium.
- Other Steemians are receivers and the prime receivers are the followers who can see posts in their feeds.
We can see that for effective communication to take place, followers play an instrumental role as receivers.
If followers are necessary, should we do anything to get them?
This is where the heart of the problem lies. There's no doubt that followers are an important part of Steemit experience. However, the way followers are achieved matters a lot. There are some good ways of gaining followers. But there are some which are not good.
Three Ways of Gaining Followers
- Organic - Organic followers are the ones who saw your content and profile, liked it and saw value enough to follow you for more.
- Scheming - The most popular form of scheming is "follow for follow" (f4f), which mainly came from Twitter. In scheming, followers are gained by joining follow for follow groups/campaigns.
- Fan Following - There are some Steemians with a significant followers all over the internet already. When they come to Steemit, they bring a lot of their followers as well. I can quote many people here but @jerrybanfield comes to my mind immediately.
For personal example, when I joined Steemit, I immediately understood its worth and got on to my personal blog to tell everyone about it.
Many of my 10,000 social media connections (reduced by 9000 due to Facebook permanently disabling my account) shared it and so many people joined Steemit as a result. These people followed me as well. But the majority of my followers are organic; the kind people who chose to follow me for what I do on Steemit.
This is how my profile looks like right now. Thanks to the 3564 amazing people who chose to follow me.
But which one of these ways is not good? I think scheming is the worst way to get followers and that's because the quality of interaction and subsequent rewards is almost certainly zero. As far as my opinion is concerned, the best type of followers are those who choose to be your followers.
Fan following is always a plus and it is well deserved because of the background hard work those people do to gain that popularity. However, it's a luxury that most people do not have.
Let's Discuss!
- What do you think about getting followers?
- How do you think you got your followers?
- What is the best way to build a following on Steemit?
Steem on!