The Follow for Follow and Mass Following Methods

**The Follow for Follow** (also abbreviated *F4F*) is one of the most known AOTY methods to grow your account. The method consists in following everybody who follows you, with the intent of gaining popularity and obtaining consistent likes on your reviews. This method is, more often than not, paired with the mass following method, which consists in following huge amounts of user in hopes of getting follow backs. The use of these methods has been target of criticism by old AOTY users, spawning some controversy. They claim that the methods strip back the concept of having the follower amount show up on your page, as it no longer holds any value.

These methods actively inflate follow numbers and create a discrepancy between number of followers and actual AOTY relevancy. This creates some peculiar situations in which, for example, a user that does not use these methods may have 400 followers and be a household name of the community, where as a user with 2,000 followers is virtually unknown, or at least not as well known as said user with 400.

## Extreme Mass Following

Mass following has been, for years, a common method that new AOTY users resort to when they first create their account in order to gain popularity, but it was taken to an extreme first by now deleted AOTY user Kengoji\_Ultam, who took advantage of the long-since removed New Users tab to follow every single user on the website, gaining thousands of followers in the process. After his account deletion, he was followed by Craigold, and then by AOTY user cakenator. These two fought to become the user with the highest amount of accounts followed. During the apex of this battle both had about 20,000 users followed. Later, Craigold held the title of most users followed with over 30,000, while cakenator had roughly 26,000. Craigold's spot was overtaken by AOTY user Rice in January 2022 with over 34,000 followed users.

## The Unfollow after Follow Method

There is also another particularity to the follow for follow method, which essentially consists in following somebody, and then unfollowing them after they follow you back. What this does is create an illusion of balancing your followed by to following ratio, as AOTY does not offer users notifications for unfollows. This way AOTY users can hypothetically follow 10,000 people, receive 1,000 followers, and then unfollow everyone. It is also common by experts in this area to follow somebody, give it a period of time, and if they do not follow them back, they follow up with the unfollow.

This method has been criticized by the community, even if not as widely as the mass following and follow for follow methods, as it is not as common and is shadier. Niche but well respected AOTY user Houdanny has a sentence in his about section that refers to this method, thus proving its widespread existence: “Don't unfollow me if I follow back, bc i will block you.“.

## Meta-F4F

The Meta-F4F is a variation to the Follow for Follow Method that is reported to first have been used by AOTY user, **Baylen**. It consists of only following the users that follow back users who used the Follow for Follow method. This could be done by spamming the follow button on said users’ *followers* tab.

This method ensures that the followed users are users who actually follow other users, and not ghost accounts who are not active anymore, and therefore raises the F4Fer’s *followed back / followed* ratio.

## The "Follow through Likes" Method

The "Follow through Likes" method is another variation of the classic follow for follow technique, in the way that it ensures that for each interaction a user has with you it wins them a follow, expanding the criteria to also encompass likes on your own reviews, and not only direct follows.

This technique has been, throughout the years, extensively implemented by AOTY user **rater\_ratings**, being his preferred technique of choice. This is perhaps the most useful and effective follow technique that exists, because it not only boosts your follower count, but also effectively increases your follower to like ratio, being a great way to avoid being a high-follow-low-likes merchant.

As we have analysed before in this article, it has been a long time since the follower count has lost its value, so it is the number of likes that is the best numerical factor to actually measure AOTY popularity. Using the "Follow through Likes" method it is ensured that the number of likes on your reviews will rise exponentially, as by following users that have liked your reviews in the past (or by following users that have liked other users' reviews, especially very popular ones) they are more prone to liking your reviews in the future. What this method does is that it increases your **effective** **popularity**, and not only the numbers on your profile.