Why you shouldn't use popular tags
The title of this post might contradict advice that other give but let me explain….
I wonder how the tagging system works and what the best way is to get your posts shown. And my own of course. I’ve seen plenty of posts on how to tag properly such as this one from @rok-sivante. Or this post from @eroche. Both are nicely explaining the benefits of tags and how to use them. Still there are tons of tags used on Steemit that are pretty under the radar.
I don’t see any option to follow tags, which I think is something that many people would like to see as a feature. I for one would! I also noticed that some posts have tags that do not seem to be indexed. I’m not sure what this is based on but I have a feeling that it might be depending on wether or not a post makes money.
And so I wonder how to get tags to be more visible and of course then which to use.
Based on quite some advice that I read, it’s recommended to use the popular tags. I however feel that, unless you become trending, you are likely not noticed by most readers with this approach. As the platform grows in users and in turn the number of posts, the top tags will result in being used too many times and so it’s easy for your post to get lost in the feed.
This post shows the stats on the number of daily posts and many other things until the 1st of December 2017. It shows that there are now over 20k posts published daily. And on 1 day the top 5 tags account for around 5k posts. So when using these your chances of being seen amongst these is truly limited.
So what I see as another way to get viewed is to choose an under the radar but popular tag to get people in a niche to see your posts. a popular tag like introduceyourself is in the top 20 of the lifetime of the blockchain. But now there is the introducemyself tag in the "all tags” section as well. This tag might get you trending faster as there are less people using it and so less competition.
Other example are the tilphilippines, cebu and rolemodel tags. These are used plenty but not all that often. At the same time these tags allow you to interact with the community that uses these regularly.
I’d personally opt for using these lesser known and used tags to keep your post more visible amongst the “noise”. Or at least to use a mix of these and the main ones.
It’s a given though that you should always only use tags that are fitting to your post. When you do this, you’ll also add value to the community that purposely uses these tags to categorise their posts and you can join the community yourself.
I would appreciate it if we can “follow” tags to get these posts show in our feed, and at the same time allow us to flag post that are wrongly using tags.
What’s your take on using these lesser known tags for your posts to identify yourself with a niche community?
One question that remains unanswered is: How do you have a tag show up in the “all tags” section?.
Do you know the answer to this? Then please let me know :)