Preface
Steemit is all about numbers game. Doesn’t matter if we are talking about Steem Power, Number of Followers or Reputation Score, its always been about “the higher, the better” on this platform.
However, in this post, i would strictly like to talk about the types of followers and the impact of followers on your rewards.
Normally, people are just contended and feel successful with having higher number of followers. While this is a big achievement on its own, having large number of followers doesn’t scream of “Success” necessarily.
So with that prelude, I have come up with Three Categories / Types of Followers in order for you to analyze that where do you exactly stand in terms of whole Success vs having large followership dynamics.
The Three Types of Followers
1. Active Followers
Introduction
These followers are loyal to your blog and to your identity. No matter what and when you post, they will always be there for you. They will not only upvote you but will go to great lengths to post lengthly relevant comments.
Active followers are type of followers what everyone should strive to get on steemit. They are the true source of your success.
Reasons You’ve Got Active Followers
There could be many reasons. I will try to enlist some of them:-
You try to engage with them, help them and duly reward their efforts.
They truly like your blog / cause / brand because it contains information that they otherwise won’t be able to easily get their hands on.
You have a ton of Steem Power and they engage with your blog regularly in hopes that you will respond with a big upvote on one of their posts.
Which Reason is the Most Desireable of Them All?
Without a doubt, reason number 1 and 2 are the most desireable of all reasons (or they should be).
Unfortunately, instead of searching and finding their favourite bloggers / brands, most of the new comers tend to follow those who have the highest of Steem Power.
While this is a good strategy as far as getting a big upvote is concerned, it seldom pays out. It is not because whales are misers by nature. It is because they can hardly focus on one particular group of “active followers” since they usually have about thousands of people following them.
2. Visiting Followers / Visitors
Introduction
Visiting followers are those who often visit your blog but not regularly. They will miss few of your posts but whenever they do pay you a visit, they will make their presence known to you. But why don’t they visit your blog regularly? Once again, there could be ton of reasons as to why they are not your active followers. I will enlist a few reasons.
Reasons You’ve Got Visiting Followers
They are pretty much occupied with their domestic / job requirements and naturally are not available on steemit on daily basis.
They have a lot of followers themselves and they can only distribute time in this fashion so that they can engage with everyone they follow.
They like few particular posts of yours and are not fans of everything that you post about.
You do not engage with them oftenly and in turn they forget about you from time to time.
How Can You Turn Your Visiting Followers into Active Ones?
There is pretty much nothing you can do about the first three cases because of obvious reasons. However, not enganging with people who follow you is the biggest mistake that you can make, which generally drives them away from your blog.
In my experience, I have seen reason number 4 to be the biggest of all reasons that make your potential active followers into visiting ones. Because as much as they like you, they don’t like being ignored over and over.
If you observe that one or few of your followers have driven away and are not regularly visiting your blog, then its time to bring them back into the fold. Take extra measures to reconnect with them through comments on their blog posts or through discord channels and within no time you can win them over.
3. Dead Followers
Introduction
Dead followers are the worst kind that you can get on steemit. They are the type that followed you once but never made an appearance on any of your blog post again whatsoever.
They do not profit you in anyway other than being part of your total number of followers.
Reasons You’ve Got Dead Followers
I would like to bring the readers’ attention as to why they might have dead followers following them.
Your level of engagement with them is absolutely zero so they totally forgot about you.
They were new users on steemit who found you interesting but sadly left steemit only to never return.
They are jealous of your success and are only following you to see your progress so that they can compare themselves with you. (Pretty sick but this actually happens alot).
How Can You Turn Your Dead Followers Into Active Ones
For starters, you can start to engage with them. Visit their blogs. Upvote their good posts. Let them know that you are interested in them. May be it will help restore the broken bonds.
If they have left steemit or if they are deliberately not interested in engaging with you then there is nothing you can really do about it.
How Do Your Followers Affect Your Rewards?
When you post an article on steemit, 75-80% of the upvotes you receive on that particular post belong to your followers. This is a huge number and there should not be any confusion about this phenomenon that your followers are directly responsible for your earnings on this platform.
But having a high number of followers doesn’t automatically generate rewards from them. You have to earn their upvotes. This requires regular engagement with them.
This might seem a very obvious statement for some, however most people neglect the very fact while continuing their journey on steemit and I have seen such cases where people have more than 1000 followers yet the average turn out on their posts doesn’t even cross 25 counts of upvotes / comments.
Keeping in view the above mentioned facts, i wouldn’t call a person having 500 followers as sucessful person when out of those 500, 450 are dead followers. It is better to have 200 followers who are active followers of your blog.
Conclusion
Steemit is not a one way street. It doesn’t matter how good your content is when you don’t have anyone who can appreciate it. Be very careful with your followers. They are your assets. They are what makes you successful. They are more than just numbers. By neglecting active engagement with your followers, you cannot hope to have a brighter future here...
Thumbnail image is designed on free canva tool. Rest of the images are taken from pixabay
Kindly consider to upvote and resteem and like always, comments are always appreciated
Great post! I think I have a lot of "dead" or spam followers...or maybe they are bots. I usually check out every follower I get just out of curiosity and some of them are following thousands of people at a time. I would rather have 100 followers who engage with me than 10K that are just doing follow for follow crap.
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Same here. Every time I notice new accounts are following me, I check them to see if they're real people and if they post things of my interest. I have come across spam followers right after I joined Steemit. I published my introduction post, and one week later I had 14 followers (mostly people who had welcomed me in my intro post, and some are my active followers to this day), but some were spam followers. Days later, I made another post. Soon after I had published the post, my number of followers increased by 10 at once, and the accounts were clearly bots/spammers. Since the bots/spammers won't get anything from me and won't appear again anyway, I wish they would just unfollow me and leave me alone... with only my real followers :P .
I also tend to be a visiting follower, mostly because of reason number 3. I either am interested only in a few topics the person posts about, or the person resteems a lot of content I'm not interested in and it'd just clutter my feed.
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Well we have all been there.. and u r right. Makes you wonder what if all bot followers would leave yo so that you can see where you stand in actuality..
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You can see with this tool how your followers behave: http://www.steemspectacles.com/@emmyem84
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Yup true.. people are follow junky.
This statement of yours summarizes everything up...
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wow, i love this
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I have a rule to post at least once a week. What ever is on my mind and I try not to force it. I keep to a few topics of interest to me. Consistency is the key. Daily posts would be better but I don't want to force them.
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While you are very much right, i would like to ask you if you meant to leave this comment on another post ? Because my post was regarding followers on steemit.. i have checked that you aren’t a spammer or a bot so thats why i thought i’d ask you.. or may be is it because i was unable to grasp your perspective on the matter..?
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Thanks for your reply, My point was that you gain followers by being consistent and upvoting and commenting on all posts you read. I may of been a bit vague but I was really just adding a bit of mayonnaise to your post. Cheers GUNGA
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Haha o well.. you are not wrong.. however i would recommend upvoting all “good” posts instead of all posts. “Good” being the operative word here. Cheers man
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Thanks again and happy Steeming!
With kind regards,
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Your comment is lit :p thank you for the appreciation.
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You can find it here.
I'm planning on making more in the future. They work well in normal and night-mode.
With kind regards,
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Something also this happen that your follower is not online at that moment, and late in reply/comment on post. The more follower is late, the more chances are that blogger wont read his/her comments because there are already so many comments posted on the blog. This is the also the 1 of the important point you need to mention because follower thinks that now now point in posting comment. I am feeling the same because i am 6 hour late and feeling that i wont be responded :D prove me wrong buddy :D
Now editing again; forget to mention that your posts are awesome and always full of actual information which we can use. Thank you very much
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It depends on the author.. you have to keep an eye on the type of author you are dealing with. I, for one, always reply to all of the people who make a comment.. i reward all of those who make a genuine effort to engage with me. i even flag them when they post spam comments. There has hardly been any comment that i have missed out. But if you are posting a comment on a whale’s post who has already received 250+ comments, i realize that it will be hard for them to respond to all of the comments..
The post was written from blogger’s point of view and not from followers’ point of view. Besides, none of it matters if the author is an introvert and doesnt want to engage with people at all.. then she/he shouldn’t complain about their followers not coming to their blogs..
thank you for the appreciation
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Thank you for your detailed reply. From now-on I am your long term follower :). Thank you for time and I understand this post was from Blogger's point of you, may be some day you will write from followers point of view ;)
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Thank you for the kind words and thank you for becoming an active follower of mine.. ^_^
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I started steemit last January and I have a lot of followers but very few active ones who upvote my posts. Thanks for sharing this. Very informative.
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Then you need to work on them. Engage with them so that they remember you ..
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I was just so happy watching my followers grow but seeing your post is making me second guess a bit. I mean I know I have bot followers and inactives but to think what if most of them are those. bummer. Need to be more active myself and engage with followers to keep them. Thanks.
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You cannot possibly have all the active followers all the time but you gotta make sure that you engage with most of them so that they keep on checking out your blog regularly. I agree there are some bots / inactive followers whom you cannot do anything about. But you have to keep majority of your followers active.. nice on you to reflect on the issue.. ^_^
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I agree engagement is the only way to go @jbn. It takes time but it also keeps you motiated when you can have enuine conversations with people. I wish there was more of it but since the price of Steem went by I've notice a number of the people I used to engage with are no longer active.
I also wish there was a way to stop people/bots following from following me. It would be good to at least be able to exclude those from my follower numbers. I see the same bots daily following and unfollowing and cloggin up my GINA feed.
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Well.. you are right. Alot of people have either left or become inactive on steemit ever since the price of steem took a nose dive.
And wonderful suggestion regarding be able to filter out your followers.. i wish those bots could go away so that i can get a real picture of my followers.
But dont worry.. good times are coming.. we just need to hang in there..
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I like your positivity @jbn. I'm keeping on keeping on but it's not always easy. This week I'm on a mission to try and make it fun again! 😊
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You have made it easier to understand steemit.i think you are absolutely right to say that the types of followers affect your rewards. I would like to see all my followers active. And as you said you can make any visiting or dead followers active by having regular conversation with them on your posts. If you don't reply to their comments then you will not find their comments on your posts. I like these strategies, I think they might help. Thank you
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I am glad that i was able to help you out. You are most welcome. And thank you for the kind words..
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This is an excellent post about the followers in steemit, keeping followers requires a continuous work, read their posts, make constructive comments.
Not necessarily the best post get more upvote and this is due to a reason. MARKETING, and how is it done ?, precisely establishing good relations with our followers, supporting and applying the principle of reciprocity. Greetings continue with your good contributions to Steemit.
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Very good summarization of the post.. thank you for the great words of encouragement. ^_^
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You are welcome, just tell the truth
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An interesting article, you have covered an important area of Steemit.
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Thank you very much :)
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Great write up, wish I can have many Active Followers. Can't wait to be come a Whale.
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Its easy. You can become whale in 2 steps
There you go :p
Everybody wishes to grow here but like i said in response to another comment, its a time taking process.. hang in there ^_^
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Without buying 100,000 steem, there are no chance to become whale right ? then second option is to wait till 1 or 2 year till you have 5000 followers ? Right ?
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Thats pretty much true. Almost every whale out there has bought steem when it was trading at 0.07$ last year.. organically acuqiring steem can take some time..
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Dead followers (including bots and follow for follow seekers) are disheartening for anyone posting and hoping for engagement.
I recently went on a quest to find my real followers and what they are doing. That included commenting and upvoting at full power 3 posts per day, plus resteeming one per day for a week. I had very few replies on my comments, and only one who commented on my own posts during or after that week, from the followers I engaged with on their blogs (or resteemed).
Ah, and while visiting their profiles during that week, I noticed many users had the voting power at 100%.
So, my quest had two results: first I was surprised to discover some of my followers, their talents, their topics of interest, etc., and second, I was and am disappointed by the lack of engagement, may it be comments, upvotes, resteemes or all of them.
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The trend of curating post has somewhat lost.. there was a time when steemit used to split 50% 50% rewards between author and curators.. so people were generally inclined towards curating other posts.. since the split has been shifted to 75-25% in favour of authors, getting upvotes have become a tiresome task.. i wish if they could change back the split to 50-50, you will see a lot more upvotes on your posts...
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Yes , I agree with that. I am in steemit for almost 2 months yet I still have fewer followers who really upvote my posts. Mostly, it is from the trail. Sad :(
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Its sad for now.. but you will be pretty happy when they all grow up with you. Its a time taking process..
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Good post. Can you tell me where I can find more about this ?
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Right here.. if you need to ask about something, just ask brother. I don’t mind questions. Infact i love conversations..
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The article is correct and can be instructive for many new users who are rushing to subscribe to a large number of people. This opinion is wrong, because it is better to have a few active readers. I have more than 1000 followers, but most are inactive users. It would be nice to have a tool with which we could remove dead followers.
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I totally agree with you
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The best followers are the ones who continuously engage with you via comments. If it stays one way or we don't reply or upvote their comments, they are bound to leave us. Letting that happen is a big mistake.
Dead followers are greatest in numbers because most people do not bother learning much in the start and leave Steemit in frustration. I know many of my followers are dead.
Having more, but organic, is important. It's important to regularly switch among all of them to keep them engaged.
A great post to read and share so I resteemed it!
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Aah yes. Wonderful summarization by the “teacher” himself.. i agree that at any given time, the percentage of dead followers will always be greater than your active and visiting followers combined. But even then, we should always strive to engage with as many followers as we can. Its worth the trouble..
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Thank you for writing this up. As a drive by commenter I am looking to improve my experience on Steem and have learned yet another piece to the puzzle.
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Thank you very much.. glad i could help
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I hope and I pray that all my followers are not "dead" followers, especially now that I've been really busy with my new job and in taking good care of my nanay (who suffered from mild stroke). Not to mention those challenges that me & my friends have accepted, yes we had fun too. I haven't have enough time to reply back to all of them esp. those who are consistently present in my comment section. Thank you so much for this post, sir and as always, you have my full support. God bless you po :-)
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No matter what you do, you will always have dead followers. There are people who joined the platform, followed you and then left. So there is nothing we can do to bring them back. However we can strive to keep those active who are still here on this platform..
po i hope your nanay is in good health now after that mild stroke. My thoughts and prayers are with her.. blessings
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thank you for your prayers...still using her wheelchair and can't stand & walk alone...But she's having her daily therapy sir...As of this posting she can move her left leg and left arm already...God is good I know she will be well soon :-) God bless po. :-)
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Inciteful and more importantly ACCURATE!
The most relevant point you made in my opinion is the one about people just hanging constantly around the whales, thinking they are gonna get noticed among the thousands...Uhm, not a chance.
And also your point about content quality, perhaps being amazing, but nobody seeing it as you do not have the followers. I have just spent a few hours editing a post that almost no-one will see, I do it as a labour of love. I hone my writing skills, this will eventually reward me, but I don't expect a cent from it at the moment.
Engagement=Rewards...Eventually, thanks for the info breakdown, interesting to hear the perspective of someone else :)
Take great care and have an amazing day and an even better journey ahead.
Image courtesy of the AWESOMETASTICAL Pixabay.
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Its kind of amazing that we put so much effort into writing an article that we know is gonna get ignored by majority due to us being minnows.. lets take this very post for an example. If a whale had written it, you would probably see it in trending page, but here it is.. thats the reality. Yet somehow we strive our best to deliver the best of content everytime..
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i have also many dead followers but now i will change my strategy and i should follow your guidelines.
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Thank you irfan... glad i could help..
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Most users are complaining about followers. Now it's clear they are dead. I have almost 190 followers except 4 or 5 all are dead. Just spammers
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Yup. That happens.. however if you have got any dead followers who are not spammers or bots then you can always try to engage with them and bring them to life.. ^_^
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And I am trying that since jan 2018. It's very hard work to make them alive. Anyways hard work will be remain till death.
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The dead follower one is pretty good. i should probably spend some time going through and trying to visit some of them. I get so tied up with what is on my feed i forget the other stuff.
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It is totally natural. I, myself, am an active follower of some people, visiting follower of few and dead follower of many.. because i can only spare a limited amount of time everyday for steemit.. the best strategy is to rotate amongst them every day so that they never forget your name..
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Yes followers are your real asset. Thanks for sharing your worthy point of view about followers
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Just started posting this week and these are wise words
Thanks
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I wish you the best of luck on steemit .. just hang on to the platform.. ^_^
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I guess you skipped the bot followers - That type of bots who follow huge number of people, gaining a couple of followers for free, but consuming bandwidth for nothing...
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Well.. i actually thought about writing bot followers but then i realized that bots never engage with you in the first place.. they can only spam.. so there is no point in mentioning those.. but u r right. Bots suck..
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Such a great point to be mindful of. I think we tend to want to keep building the following bigger and bigger, but we forget we can contribute to getting the most of the ones we already have.
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Absolutely true..
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im a newbie here,thank you for sharing..
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You are welcome
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Congratulations @jbn, this post is the eighth most rewarded post (based on pending payouts) in the last 12 hours written by a User account holder (accounts that hold between 0.1 and 1.0 Mega Vests). The total number of posts by User account holders during this period was 2356 and the total pending payments to posts in this category was $4226.63. To see the full list of highest paid posts across all accounts categories, click here.
If you do not wish to receive these messages in future, please reply stop to this comment.
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Thank you very much. But i am gonna have to flag you for posting spam since you seem to be posting this comment on every blog post you are coming across
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.
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Yes. It is considered as a spam..
And you are lucky that my flag will not cost you anything. But a flag froma Whale will pretty much put you in negative reputation score..
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