The importance of telling your fanbase about Steem

There are a lot of very active social media personalities joining lately who make content about anything and everything and it's really awesome to see their interest in our platform!

For the longest time I've been advertising our platform to others who already use many social media sites in general. Content creators have realized that limiting themselves to only one is not good for their reach and there are very few of them nowadays who only focus on one platform. I'm probably the exception since the only other platform than Steem that I can browse without feeling the urge to smash my head into a wall is Reddit, but anywhere you look you can see people advertising the other platforms they are on.

So why not add Steem to the bundle? That's what I've been asking many over the years and many of them have taken me up on my offer and checked the site out even though not as many remained active here. I'm sure many of them are biting their hat now looking back at what they have missed out on.

I saw the potential in Steem very early on and I've been focusing on gaining a following here more than anywhere else. I noticed even Reddit has resorted to creating user profiles lately where you can follow people there and they all seem to be competing versus another in active userbase, but most of them don't share something that Steem has, and that's being able to reward active contributors directly and with no middle-men charges.

Of course there many other advantages to Steem and its blockchain, but I wanted to focus on this one thing in this post which is rewarding contributions and why its so important to let your fanbase on other sites know about your presence here.

It's not just cause we want as many active people as possible to join the site, they will of course join over time. If you are someone who has a big fanbase somewhere else though, it will really help to get your account here more visibility, especially once communities start rolling in. Right now we may not have the best filtering methods of there just being "trending/new/hot/promoted" but those are not big additions that will require a massive amount of work to change. The follow option has been a much better way to build your own feed into what you want to read and see daily and which followers you want to support with your voting power.

If you are a user who does have a big fanbase somewhere else and have been posting a lot here on Steemit it doesn't mean that you will necessarily get a lot of attention here. Sure you might use your "I have this many followers here" card and that could get you some voting support for some time, but if our still small active userbase are not interested in your content or you as a person, your posts won't have much engagement going. I've seen a lot of people lately who join and present themselves, but don't make an effort into letting their already existing fanbase know that they are active on Steemit and to join them there. They often get buried under the rest of the content or the authors who have managed to get a big following of Steemians and that shouldn't be a surprise to them.

Being famous on another site doesn't always necessarily mean you will automatically make a killing here. If you are making good rewards but none of your older fanbase is also using Steem to check out your content and engage with you, then over time the big influencers will get tired of supporting your work cause the views/comments to payout ratio will not look all that great - which has been a big reason in the past to why big influencers have been flagging others as they focus on those statistics. What's worse in my opinion is if you only use Steem as a way to post your material and not even engage with the community yourself - remember that Steem is a pretty new platform and the first impressions will matter a lot.

Someone who I admire in the way he has jumped into the Steem platform is @davidpakman. I've watched many of his videos without knowing who he was before he joined and you can tell that he has put a lot of effort into getting his followers into Steem as well and they have continued to support him here with their votes and comments and most of his posts are so engaging compared to many others.

That's one of the big advantages to Steem, of course as someone as big as him you can't expect him to be able to engage with all readers but the fact that he can now reward them for their contributions with votes is something very unique to our platform and a big reason why you should get your other followers onto Steem to support your content here as well. It's pretty much a win-win-win for everyone involved.

I hope many of the newcomers will look at @davidpakman as a great example.

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