In recent days there have been a flood of new users to Steemit and I have noticed my followers increasing daily. I had been aiming at increasing my following by 100 a month, but this past month I have increased my followers by nearly 300 in one month alone. I have also noticed some new accounts with a huge number of followers for the short time they have been here.
In this post find out why followers are important?, what people are doing to get followers? and some tips to help you increase yours.
Visibility
Followers are important on Steemit as they are a key ingredient to successful posts here. Your post needs to get seen to be able to get votes, comments and interaction. A post for a new user, a user without followers, only appears on one or two feeds and can quickly disappear into oblivion.
Follower Feeds
When you post, your post will automatically appear in your followers feeds. The next time they log on to Steemit they will see recent posts from people they follow. This is a way to filter content on Steemit and is crucial to remember so that your carefully crafted content gets the visibility it deserves. For newbies it's also good to know that this is probably the reason why that first post you have put so much effort, energy and passion into has only got 2 votes.
Engagement
When talking about followers it is not all about numbers, quality is just as important.
Who do you want to see your posts?
If your goal is to get a message out, get comments and feedback then you will need to have people follow you that have similar interests.
You will also need followers that are awake the same time as you. Don't forget Steemit is Global!. Breakfast time in Europe is the middle of the night in America.
High Payouts
If your interested in getting high payouts then you need to find followers that have a lot of Steem power, their votes carries more weight. You need to find a few Whales and get them to follow you to help with this.
Whales
When you vote or when someone votes for you, the increase in payment is a factor of several things but a key ingredient is the Steem Power of the person voting. People with a large amount of Steem Power are known as Whales. Some use their power for questionable purposes but most use their power for good. They have a huge investment in the platform and it's in their interest to make the place better. They do this by promoting content which they feel is to the benefit of the community.
Everyone remembers bagging their first whale, that's when a post you wrote jumps from nothing to 10 dollars.
New Users
There have been consistently hundreds of new users signing up each day. Some of these accounts already have a large following, 700+ in just a few days.
There is obviously an art to getting followers and remember this is key to get your posts seen. So what can you do to get a share of these new users and maybe bag a whale in the process?
Analysis
The first thing to do is to look at accounts with successful strategies for gaining followers. What have they done and what can you learn from? This first graph shows the Number of Followers ordered by Account Value.
Followers
data from www.steemwhales.com
The stand out points is highest account by followers is 
In the middle there are some accounts with over 1,000 followers which will be interesting to look at.
But what really stands out to me are at the lower end of the account value, where there are a few accounts with significant followers. I would assume these are new accounts so how have they managed to get so many followers in a short space of time? I am going to explore these accounts in another post. There are some unusual ones. There is one with just 2 posts but over 900 followers.
Accounts with most Followers
Lets continue by looking at the accounts with the most followers. The following table shows the accounts with the most followers. An interesting ratio to look at is the ratio of Posting to Curation rewards.
Accounts Following the most
Some accounts actively follow lots of users. Is this a good strategy to get followers?
Tips
Finally some tips to gain followers.
Make Connections
The only way to gain genuine followers is to make connections. This requires time and effort. You need to interact with people. This can seem intimidating at first but you will quickly get to know people from reading their posts, commenting on articles and reaching out to people in Steemit Chat or on Discord.
Regular Posting
Regular posting helps, each post I write I usually pick up a few followers. This is how I started but it can be very demoralising at first if your posts are not getting much attention. Persevere, even if a post I wrote only got 5 cents, as long as I got 1 new follower I was happy.
Introduce Yourself
There are a few ways to do this, you can write an introduce yourself post, but even updating your bio in the about section of your profile will make a difference. A cool Avatar or photo of yourself will make your account stand out and memorable too.
Don't forget to have fun and comment lots. If there is a particular topic your interested in, check out the photography tag and comment on those posts. When someone comments on my post I usually follow them back if their comment has been interesting. Be generous with your follows and people will reciprocate.
Bag a Whale
In general bagging a whale and getting genuine followers require the same formula. Good quality content, and consistent, but I feel this may change as Steemit evolves. It may be a case where additional filters will be included so that you can read articles for example, just get posts about photography etc.
I have gotten a few whales to vote for me since I joined here, but only one or two follows. Most are very discerning and will only follow you if they like what your doing. There is hard and fast rule here but you probably need to make a good impression.
Observations
I noticed a few notable accounts that do not follow many people. I find it surprising that some of the most prolific authors, and ones who regularly earn very large rewards do not follow many users.
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Travel and lots of random topics.
Images are taken from https://pixabay.com/ unless otherwise stated.
