Why artificially growing your number of followers is useless?
By: Smillew Rahcuef
Tags: Marketing Strategies, Social Media Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Followers

Why artificially growing your number of followers is useless?

Because it doesn’t work, or rather, it doesn’t work anymore. It’s typically a strategy that is easily replicable, and that works if you’re the only one to use it, which means it quickly won’t be the case.

Step 1 — Only a few people use it => it works.

Step 2 — Therefore other people get interested,

Step 3 — and start using the strategy massively => it doesn’t work anymore.

The strategy consisting of producing good content, on the other hand, isn’t so easy to replicate. It’s highly effective but time-consuming. Therefore it never gets to “Step 3”.

It doesn’t work with people

Coming back to the example from Medium. If someone is following only a few people, including your profile, then the “latest from following” might catch their eye. They might read what you just published.

If they follow you and many others, on the other hand, then the “latest from following” won’t promote your articles for more than a short time. And someone following you because you followed them is very likely to follow many users.

My adventures on WordPress are another example. After a few posts, I noticed the number of followers going up and felt excited about it. Since they were my first followers, I checked them a bit. Then I realized they had names like “Keto Diet for Winning at Tinder” or “Viral Content for Cute Kittens”. And pages with nothing but ads and copied content (if any).

I also noticed someone was systematically liking my posts. I checked on their profile and, blushing with pride, realized they had several thousands of followers. Me, a newcomer, I got the recognition of such a famous blogger! Then I started browsing around and found their likes everywhere. They weren’t appreciating my work; they were fishing for profile views.

It worked (very) short-term because I was new. It didn’t work for long, because the content wasn’t interesting to me. Now I don’t check likes and followers anymore, but I do check people commenting on my post. You can go “fishing” this way as well, but in general, the profiles behind them are interesting.

Being new to a platform doesn’t mean a platform is new. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. If someone is new to something, this person’s going to think of optimizing strategies everyone thought of before, and google search for more.

There’s no competitive edge to be gained from an “easy-to-implement strategy.” There could be a dis-competitive edge, in the sense that if you don’t do it, then you lose something compared to the competition. But I don’t think it’s the case with followers. Algorithms made sure of that.

It doesn’t work with algorithms

Algorithms can be tricked, but not for long.

Maybe at one point, the number of followers was a very significant variable. The more followers, the more interesting the user, and the more its content was promoted in the feed or main page of others. But then, (very quickly), people started following a lot of users (artificially or not), and their feed became messy. So algorithms changed; other variables were added.

To predict how interesting a profile is going to be for others, a better variable is “number of followers” AND “following/followers ratio.” The former as high as possible and the latter as low as possible. But the follow/unfollow strategy seeks to maximize exactly this. So an even better variable is “people following the user are interested in, and interacting with the user’s content.”

Taking the example of Facebook, you would think that number of likes is the best predictor of how interesting a post is going to be. But last year, Facebook started to experiment with hiding them. It doesn’t necessarily mean algorithms don’t use the info anymore. But my bet would be that hiding the number of likes make people less likely to like.

More important than likes is the time spent by the user reading the post or watching the pictures. Does the user scroll without stopping? Or does it watch, scroll down and scroll back up to watch some more? In the latter, no matter if they liked it or not, they got interested.