Building Your Steemit Presence: The Quest for Engaging Content — Ask Questions!

As an observer and someone with a keen interest in pattern recognition, I often find myself drilling down inside the roots of ”what makes online content compelling and engaging.”

Pale lilac poppy in our garden

We often talk about wanting to increase engagement — both on Greater Steemit and in our individual communities — and my reply to that particular issue has always been ”If you want more engagement, write more engaging content!”

Of course, that’s somewhat of a smart-alecky answer so I suppose it behooves me to take a closer look at what that really means.

As a long term (20+ years) blogger, my desire and objective has always been centered around (A) getting people to read my stuff and (B) getting people engaged enough in what I have to say that they become regular readers rather than just visitors.

Let’s set the rewards aspect aside for a moment, and apply that here.

We want people to find our posts, and we hope what they find is compelling enough that they choose to add our content to their personal feeds on a permanent basis — not just come for a one-time visit and leave. Let me tell you, lots of long-term members of this community rarely find the time to go much beyond answering comments on their own posts, and a cursory read of their following/friends feed.

So you want to become part of that feed!

Let’s Start With a Fundamental Truth!

”Fishing” for a large upvote via a deceptive post title and content ”you think everyone will like” is actually worth far less than engaging a genuine follower who’ll visit and interact with most of your posts from this point forward!

Simply having a large number of ”followers” is far less important than having actual engaged readers.

Consider this parallel example: My twitter account is 13 years old and I only have some 1,500+ followers. But I have never used any ”help” or ”gimmicks” to get those followers. They are there only because they thought my tweets were interesting enough to warrant following.

But for years now, I have been receiving private messages offering me to ”get 10,000 followers for just $99.95!”

Sounds tempting, right?

It’s actually completely useless! Overlooking the fact that many might be ”dead” accounts… as content creators, we don’t ”need” people who simply know how to click a ”follow” button and then will never visit our content again. We need people who see our content, feel engaged by it, and subsequently feel inspired to add us to their ”short list” of people whose content they actually want to look at again.

So what do we do?

Engagement: Ask Questions!

”Yeah, but how do I DO that?”

It's not as tricky as you think. For starters, keep in mind that nobody is expecting Pulitzer Prize quality journalism on a social site.

All you really have to do is write about something interesting from your life that you feel authentically enthusiastic about… and then end your post by asking a few questions.

If you have read my blogs more than a few times you've probably noticed that virtually all of my posts end with a few lines in which I invite people to comment, and beyond that — to help those who weren't too sure what to say — I ask some very simple questions relating to what I just wrote about that can be easily answered in a couple of sentences.

The surprising and often rewarding thing is it quite often I'll come back to a post and discover that somebody has left a quite lengthy and engaging comment and we end up having an actual conversation over it.

Engagement is a Global Affair!

Again, remember that it doesn't have to be complicated.

Your post could be something as simple as a few photographs of unusual birds you saw in your yard today. Post the pictures, write a bit about them and then you close the post out by asking readers whether they enjoy bird watching and whether they enjoy nature photography.

The nice thing about this is that it's an approach that easily crosses international borders — it doesn't matter whether your first language is English, Korean, Italian, German, Hindi, or something else… this is the Global Language of the Social Web!

So, to summarize, in order to create more engaging content ask questions and invite people to engage!

Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your weekend!

How about YOU? What makes content interesting enough that you leave a comment? Do you learn something? Or do you want to start a debate? Or do you just not leave comments, at all? If not, why not? What specifically makes you want to FOLLOW a blogger? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210605 21:14 PDT
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