Every new person joining Steemit looks forward to gaining more followers. 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?
This is the question we are going to explore in this post. A mean of all opinions, inluding the content of this post and your comments under it, will give a way forward to have a common position on followers.
Is it a worthy objective to have more followers?
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 accross. Since Steemit is an interaction based community, let's revisit our basic knowledge of communication skills.
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.
If we view communication in terms of Steemit then:-
- 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
There are three ways to gain followers in my opinion.
- 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 and @suppoman come 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 shared it and so many people joined Steemit as a reslut. 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.
But which one of these ways is not good? I think scheming is the worst way to get followers and we will see why, later in this post. 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.
Let's Discuss!
What do you think about getting followers? How do you think you got your followers?
