It's a question I see asked every day - how do I get more followers?
Now, followers are no guarantee of high post rewards. One large follower could potentially be worth thousands of small ones. However, your followers number is a good general proxy, along with your reputation level, of your overall progress in the Steemit community. They give your posts and blog a greater air of authority that will ensure it gets read by more users than a blog with 7 followers will.
The network acceptance effect is real. The more users that are perceived to read and interact with your blog, the more rewards you will ultimately see:
So, how do we get from "complete online nobody" (me 4 months ago) to "reasonable online presence" (hopefully, me now)?
Let's start with what not to do. It's impossible to increase your follower numbers if you are driving people away from your blog, and it is very difficult to recover if you cause your reputation to be flagged into the negative (sub-25, which is the baseline starting point.) We've all made at least one of these mistakes I suspect, so let's take a look with all judgment aside.
I have informally surveyed a wide variety of users, as well as considered my own research on public opinion, and my results mostly agree on the following "things not to do".
They are, roughly in order of importance:
1. Plagiarism/Identity Theft - Plagiarizing on Steemit is the fastest way to the dust-bin and will make you a magnet for flags and ruin your reputation. Bots like @cheetah will catch your cut and pastes, and abuse teams will catch your identity theft very quickly. Don't bother. The last @JerryBanfield imitator didn't even make it to 30 rep before being flagged out.
2. Beg for anything - This includes votes, follow, resteems, editing work, time - anything. Steemit is not your personal, digital panhandling service. You might be able to pull a few strings with some sob stories about how $2 US is the average salary in your country. However, if all you do is extract value from the Steemit platform without producing any worthwhile content, you'll find your welcome soon overstayed.
3. Post generic comments / "spam" - At Steemit, spam is not only the traditional spam we are used to, such as marketing fliers or repetitive nonsense. Comments such as "good post", "upvoted", etc are generally considered borderline spam. The best case scenario if you make them is you will be ignored or pull a token 1% vote. Don't make a comment if you can't provide something that wouldn't cut and paste accurately onto another article.
4. Flag - New users probably should not be flagging much. You are probably not familiar enough with the culture to know when to safely flag, you will be unable to provide any noteworthy reduction in rewards, and you may just poke the wrong bear.
5. Post without pictures - If you post without any pictures, your post will receive no thumbnail in the New/Hot/Trending lists. This is effectively post suicide. Terribly formatted pictures, pictures that do not appear properly, or pictures that produce an awful thumbnail should be immediately edited and replaced.
6. Post with bad opening lines - A similar, though less egregious mistake, than using no images. Your first 15-20 words is all that will show up in the New/Hot/Trending lists. Don't waste them.
7. Post "XXXX followers posts" too often - These are a mixed bag. I don't do them, generally, but I've seen users post reliably every 100 followers. I've seen a lot of users complain about not liking these posts, even saying they unfollow people for these posts. Keep your minor personal milestones to yourself, unless you are going to work your followers into the post with a giveaway of some type. Our culture is fatigued of participation trophies.
8. Post too often - A minor failing, but more than perhaps 4-5 posts a day, unless they are all high-quality, will potentially overload your users still attempting to follow their feeds. They may remove you.
9. Resteem too often - A corollary to #8. Don't over do it, make sure your content is prominent in your blog.
10. Asking for info in comments - If you could google it yourself, then do so. Post the results in a comment to help others.
11. Overusing bot boosters / Resteem services - A minor issue, but if the entirety of your comments are notifications from Booster, Randowhale, etc then your whole post takes on an air of non-human discussion. Also note, some users consider vote-buying from these services as equally unethical from whales vote buying/trading, since they are different only in magnitude.
In part two, I will discuss how to actually start gaining followers, and then how to transition that into authoring your own posts instead of comments (which is where you should be at first!)
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Sources: Effects of Social Influence on Acceptance of Online Social Networks
Copyright: Dale Carnegie, Calvin & Hobbes