Steemit brings new opportunities to try some interesting experiments. Currently I'm the 13th most followed user on this platform, down by 1 position as I took a break from writing to focus on other things in the past 4 weeks. In the process of getting there from 60-70 most followed I learned a few things and I'll share a couple of them today.

^Source

From mid-May to July I concentrated on gaining many followers to the point that I grew my account from 600 followers in mid-May to over 5000 by July by simply posting every day. I was following a little over 2000 accounts at the time and in mid-July I decided to do something different and followed many more users.

As someone who is trending regularly it was easier to gain traction on my posts and have giant leaps in follower counts. On an average when I've been posting regularly without following anyone I was getting about 50-80 followers a day and that doubled up with me following other users.

This is a strategy that works well if you want to increase your numbers but the real question is this: Does this result in better engagement?

This is a question that I've been asked a lot on and off Steemit.Chat in the past few months. It's no doubt that anyone making the trending page on a regular basis is going to have tremendous engagement (votes+comments+views) and increase in follower count.

Let's remember that our world is a place of perceptions. Having a huge follower count certainly helps. Unlike Instagram where you can buy hundreds and thousands of fake followers via services, this isn't currently possible on Steemit and unlikely that it'll ever be. Here people will have to manually follow you to increase your follower count.

The result of this lil' experiment was interesting. I'll lead with the positive bits first based purely on observation and some tracking using Steem explorer tools such as @spectacles as well as Steemdb.com.

In recent times I've been helping my friend @sjennon and her partner in development @pilcrow with some ideas for their app @spectacles. It provides some unique insights into your account and it's currently in beta version which you can test out here!

The Good

1. Increase in resteems
2. Increased view counts
3. Very slight change in number of upvotes received
4. The perception and appeal of a large follower base.
5. Increase in comments

There are some shortcomings to the follower system that is likely to be improved in the days to come and that's something I would like us to discuss and maybe come up with some ideas that Steemit could consider working towards and improving the platform.

Not So Good

1. Upvotes or lack thereof. Now i'm not talking payout value here but purely number of votes that you receive. Before the jump from 3000 followers to 9000 I used to receive about 220-270 votes on an average. Now I receive around 300-340 and sometimes 400 and above. At 3000 followers this was approx 9-10% engagement but with 9000+ followers this is roughly 3% engagement. Some of the authors who make it to the front page and rank within a few minutes seem to have bot farms following them in addition to high stake holders of the platform following their posts. Just so you know Facebook pages give you 1-2% engagement without paid promotion but that's not an accurate comparison.
2. Ghost followers or dead followers. People who follow you but never interact with your account. This figure includes those who are inactive entirely from Steemit.
3. People comment but rarely upvote. There are a many times when the comments on a blog exceeds the votes on it. What can be done to get people to upvote more often. Even if it's a small 1-5% upvote.
4. Better notification system as we move to sub-communities.

You can view these are other details with @spectacles. Be sure to follow them as well as @sjennon.

Some of the things that you can consider doing:

1. Interact with other users of the platform via comments and Steemit.Chat.
2. Build a profile on Steemit, add description etc.
3. Help people achieve their goals and in turn that has helped me increase my engagement on Steemit.
4. Participate in contests or host contests.
5. Have a content marketing strategy to push your content outside of Steemit and build your audience.
6. Get involved in community building activities.

Building an excellent audience on Steemit will have many perks. I'll write to this effect as we go.

Meanwhile what do you think can be done differently to improve engagement so as to get your ghost followers to engage with your content once again and bring dead followers back to using Steemit once again?

---

If you like my work kindly resteem it to your friends. You may also continue reading my recent posts which might interest you:

1. Successful #2 India Steemit Accelerator and Steem Cryptocurrency Meetup 2017 at Robert Bosch India HQ!
2. My 1st Steemit Anniversary — Looking Back at an Amazing Year Of My Life!
3. Dummies Guide to Basic Steemit Account Security + Account Recovery Guide! Must Read For Steemit Users!

---

Follow Me: @firepower