Road to 50k #1 – Not all followers are created equally

Hey guys its Jason here, thanks for joining me in the first of my Road to 50k blog series. Throughout this series I’m going to be sharing my journey with you on the way to 50k on my Instagram account. First of all let’s do some housekeeping. As of this morning I had 3535 followers up 300 on last week, Impressions +7000, Reach +7000.  

I’m happy with the progress for last week, I had 5 posts go viral and increased my overall engagement by a full percentage point!!

Now that we have covered the basics I wanted to talk to you about followers and how they are not necessarily created equally. On reflection what I’m about to talk about could be relevant to Steemit as well.

Follow/Unfollow

I’ve kind of gotten used to people using the follow/unfollow strategy on my account and it’s easy to spot the usual suspects this strategy on my account. For the people that don’t know the follow/unfollow strategy is used to gain followers fast. You take advantage of the fact that a high percentage of the people you follow will instantly follow you back. Once you follow them a couple of days later you unfollow them and hey presto you have a ‘free follower’. 

The problem I have with this is that it sends a message to the follower that you don’t value them or their content enough to keep following them.  Therefore in some cases this results in the follower either unfollowing you or just don’t bother to engage with your content.

Also I haven’t seen an account yet using this strategy that has had a decent level of engagement. So on the surface the account may look successful but dig a little deeper and these accounts are essentially zombies, because their mass following is not being converted into actual people engaging with the content.

If you are running the account as a business or as a sales channel, you are essentially wasting your time, because if your followers can’t be bothered to engage with your content. It’s unlikely that they will care about your products or services that you are trying to push.

Speculative following

I may have made the term up haha, but for me speculative following is when you ask someone to follow your account or use the hashtag #follow4follow to get more followers. On the face of it, this looks great, why wouldn’t you do this to increase your following?

But when you dig a little deeper you end up with the same result as the follow/unfollow strategy. Congratulations you now have a bunch of followers that actually have no interest in you, your account, or content. So again I ask the question why bother?

Since joining Steemit, I am starting to see this particular strategy playing out. Random people or bots either following me in the hope that I follow them, or dropping a comment on my content asking me to follow them, again I find myself asking the same question why ask a random person to follow you if they have no interest in your content?

The alternative to the above strategies is actually easy to do, it just takes time and effort to execute. Go and find people that are actually likely to enjoy your content or would receive some value from it. Take a genuine interest in their content, that way you can be under no illusion that they are actually following you for all the right reasons.

Thanks for reading fellow Steemians! As always if you have received some value from this post please hit the upvote button or drop comment. If you’d like to see more hit the follow button. ✌✌