Social media is a necessary communications tool, and brands and their boards of directors are becoming increasingly excited by numbers of followers and ‘likes’ on social media profiles.
The quality of your following is important – as a brand, you want followers to engage and to care about what you have to say. It’s much more important that you get Resteemed and that both parties get involved in conversation, than having thousands of followers who aren’t bothered.
The follow/unfollow technique is often used to increase follower numbers: you follow a hundred people, wait a couple of days to see who follows back, and then unfollow those who don’t follow back (and repeat). Unfortunately, it works, but the followers you’re left with won’t necessarily care about your brand – they’re just numbers.
If you have a personal account, you may have seen this method in action. That moment of joy when you see someone new liked what you had to say, then that crushing feeling two days later when they disappear.
Just when you think you’ve got the hang of Steemit and all your hard work is paying off, so much so that people are desperate to see your next 140 characters, alas, it wasn’t to be: someone just wanted you to follow them back. Ouch.
Twitter actually considers this activity spamming: aggressive following and unfollowing is penalised by the social media platform, according to its management tool, SocialBro. So surely there must be another way to get your numbers up?
The advice to give is:
Your timeline is precious
There are so many great people to follow on Steemit, whether for social or business reasons, which already means we’ve got to have razor-like observation skills to keep up to date with the amount of people we follow. Using the follow/unfollow technique, you end up following people you’re not that bothered about and they end up following you back even though they might not be that interested either. Don’t be offended if someone you follow doesn’t reciprocate the feeling (see creating a conversation) and don’t worry about offending anyone else. Just follow who you think will enrich that timeline of yours.
Organic growth
Fill your timeline with dynamic content that gets people talking. Share your personal thoughts and interests as well as your business messages – both should be genuinely interesting, engaging and eye-catching enough to warrant a resteem or an upvote from one of your existing followers. They’’ll share it with their followers, who in turn might like what they see and give you a follow for future news from you. It feels much better that way – people are starting to follow you for being you, not following you because you threatened them with an unfollow unless they paid the ransom.
Creating a conversation
Steemit brings us all closer to the action by enabling us to listen in on snippets of information from all over the world. As well as listening, we’re able to respond with our own opinions and each reply has the potential to start a discussion. Over time you might find that you develop a rapport with someone who enjoyed your witty retorts so much they want a more regular slice of the action enough to follow back.
Follow handy tips to engage
As we continue to learn more about social media and research into online behaviour develops, this helps us to behave a bit better ourselves. When it comes to following and unfollowing for upping numbers, we like to think of how it would happen in ‘real life’. If you spotted someone interesting in a pub, you would need to get their attention to get them to engage (follow). They’re far more likely to do that if; they’re impressed with your introduction (creating a conversation); impressed with someone else telling them about you (a retweet from a friend); or impressed by the way you carry yourself once you’ve introduced yourself (so follow our tips to be a better tweeter, and they’ll see you’re worth it).
Hope you found this worth reading. However, you still can drop a comment here so other people can find you and who knows, may be click the follow button. :)