Why 1000+ followers means nothing?

in #illustration6 years ago (edited)

Hurray! I've got my first thousand of followers on Steemit!

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This is my case. It happened right now but there is nothing to celebrate actually. Yes, this is some sort of milestone and round beautiful number but still if you will look at the stats deeper you can find out some interesting facts. Great that Steem is open blockchain system so we can get as many details as we want from there.

But first, let me introduce myself from other networks. Since I am freelancing as an illustrator worldwide for around last 10 years I've collected few fellows here and there.

My Stats from Different Social Networks

  • 3 814 Vkontakte friends (~900-1200 daily views, ~50-100 likes per post)
  • 5 000 Facebook friends (? views, ~3-150 likes per post)
  • 7 389 Instagram followers (~2000-4000 views, ~300-800 likes per post)
  • 222 892 Behance.net followers (~2500-45000 views, ~1500-3500 appreciates per project)
  • 48 Telegram Channel followers (~100-8000 views per post - fantastic!)

I've started to invite them all here. Changed the link from my personal site to this blog since Steemit is very promising.

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I never cheated to get followers. Never bought any. Never done any follow to follow things. I barely follow anyone. After Facebook changed their algorythm of showing only popular posts to your friends feed I've seen dramatically loss of views and likes there. Same for Instagram since Facebook accquired it.

Why thousands of followers usually means nothing?

According to @spectacles Steem Spectacles (alternative is http://steemit.deadfollowers.info/) from that total of 1000 Steem followers almost all of them are so called dead or inactive. You can check your stats there too.

My case:

  • 657 ghost followers (active users who didn't engage with my page at all in the last 100 posts, since I have posted around 50 posts for now this users are similar to dead for me)
  • 161 dead followers (followers who haven't been active in over a month)
    Let's count: 1000-657-161=182. Meaning out of 1000 less than 200 might be interested to see or read something out of my blog. Maybe not. Others are just numbers.

Most of these users are following just to get followbacks. Actually in the beginning I was doing the same here for few days because I thought it will work. After some time your friends feed will look like a trashcan so you won't be able to read that at all. It is better not to beg in the comments to upvote something by the way :)

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What to do?

It is better to build up clean community and focus on what you create. Communicate with other users which posts you really like. Don't look for the payments they have and don't think about money at all. It's better not to write pointless comments like "Great post, thanks for the information". You can find real friends here because people are trying to express their thoughts with smart and kind comments. You can have great professional guidance also that way. And better don't waste money buying any resteems and upvotes.

It is good if you will ask the community and read the comments from time to time. It was helping me to grow professionally in other social networks a lot. When there was lot's of positive comments for my fresh work that meant I move the right way. Never rush for the amount of followers as you can see it means almost nothing here. Do what you like to do and tell the world about in a beautiful manner. Create interesting content from your passion and you will get true readers and hopefully valuable voters.


By the way, right now I am working on eSteem Ocean stickerpack inviting for betatest it in Telegram.

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Welcome to my other accounts:

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Well, congratulations anyway! ;)
Wow, you're pretty big on Behance. I've never been very active there.
I'm inviting my Instagram followers to join Steemit as well.
Seeing my followers count going up means more people joining this platform, so in that respect it does mean something.

I hope this platform will continue to grow. I really enjoy getting in touch with others here :)

Haha! Thank you! Yeah, this is something unique Steemit can give! I never saw any other social network were people write big comments. And I feel I found much more friends here than in any other place in the net :)

Why you don't use Behance, Flo? All my foreign clients keeps coming from there. Once you are featured at the main page all the advertising world will know about you! But remember they like to feature "projects". This means you should put 10-15 illustrations together in one post there.

Creating projects is a good point. Do you think that numbers also present the illusion of success? I was told that there is the theory to collaborate with those within your social status. Meaning if you have 1000 followers someone on with 20 followers is in a different league. This culture seems to rule the social media outlet. Steemit would therefor be in the same arena. Or am I not understanding the model enough yet. Thanks for the post.

Yes, this is like a famous brand name. For example if I put the Microsoft logo on my illustration then most of the people who are not in arts will just say "Wow!" even if I will create weakest work in my life. So for that reason numbers works. And for Behance I guess follower numbers may mean a lot to the clients when they are searching for an exectuor of their idea.

For me personally it was never some barrier. If I saw someone's good profile with small amount of followers and likes I've understood that this person is just created the profile or don't know how to develop it and I am trying to help such a people usually giving some advices on that because the world should know them.

Well, you've actually sparked my interest! Perhaps I should give Behance a try. Maybe I can use my Instagram network as well to grow there.
I'm gonna look into it in a week or two. Thanks for the advice!

Don't forget to tell me once you are there :)

It's an very interesting post and there is so much truth in it. 1000 followers sounds impressive (I celebrate over 100 followers for myself today :D ) but your closer look at the stats sounds a little disappointing for the first moment. I'm not as deep in social networks as most of the other people, because I haven't seen any sens in it for a long time. All I wanted was showing my work to some other artist, seeing theirs work and talk about it. From the beginning of my 3D carrier to 2011 it works well. I've used forums and online galleries but something changed since then. A lot of people are gone and hang out on Facebook and co. I have a Facebook account too (since 2013) but just for family and close friends. I'm not a fan of Facebook, Instagram and so on. It's so... impersonal in my opinion. On steemit you have to say "Hello" before you get a place at the table. And people have to talk with each other and read what others people have written to get some personal information. Not like on Facebook where you click on a profile and see the whole life of a person. At the end it doesn't care how much followers you have . If you have a small bunch of people watching your stuff and reading your posts and you can read theirs, you've already won. :) But it can't be bad to have some more. I'm not sure if a clear my point of view (because my English is not as good as it should be) but I hope so. :)

Hundred is also nice number :) But who knows, maybe your hundred is all real? Well, anyway you're right, this doesn't really matter. The only thing matters is interaction and sharing here. For my Rusinglish your English is very good by the way. You have very strong works why don't you post more?

Most of my Artworks are older than five years and I think I it isn't needed to show all that old sh*t to the world...again. :D ;) It wasn't easy to find time and motivation in the past years to do much more personal art. And I'm not a classic artist witch have thousands of ideas and can put out artwork after artwork. I mean... I have a lot of ideas but not all of this are good to be come to life. And sometimes I need a creative break from an artwork and focusing on another. But I'm definitely motivated to do more new stuff in the future and have currently some artworks in the pipeline. :)

I totally agree with this! Steemit isn't as clean and organic as I was hoping when I started out. What's the point of all these junk followers and following junk yourself when it only clutters your feed? I feel like quality content really doesn't reach the right audience because if that. Thanks for the insight!

Congratulations on Gaining 1000 followers! That's amazing and it's good goal or milestone for everyone who's new to achieve. How's so great that it is important to big for up votes and comments. However in some of my blogs I do remind people to do that to show a little "love" but it's certainly not begging. ha ha. The big thing here is to keep your content fun, friendly, positive thinking, creative, and informative as well as being value driven.

The comment section is a great way to engage with your audience and have the audience engaged with each other and have discussions about content of the original post. It's certainly not a place to put links and spam like they do in facebook groups.

I really support steamit what they're trying to achieve here, to provide valuable posts as well as income for the content creators and curators. I hope someday to enjoy an thousand followers on steamit and that is one of my milestones.

Again many congratulations! Now see if you can grow it to 5000!!! ;)

Thanks a lot for your big and logical comment. It looks like a post :) Maybe missing 2-3 illustrations and it can be posted as an article :)

For the 5000 haha! Let's see! I don't mind to have it soon :)

Sorry for a long comment and being too wordy. lol But part of what I coach in my business is to gain a following... a large following. So when I saw your post I was drawn in and got me thinking. :)

Yes 5k! :)

No no, it was really ineteresting to read your thoughts. I like big comments. They are more valuable than just "Thanks for information" ones.

Ok, Thank you. I'm sort of new at this so... lol

Great Post.

I agree with you!

Excellent profile @ Mr.dunsky. u shared a lot of stuff about animation and others.I have been watching your previous posts also.Great job sir.
Thank you...

Thanks a lot, Tarunsai! I am glad you're alive! :)

Your behance follower number is ridiculous! Congrats

Thank you! This is really ridiculous if I understand you right :) I think one of their moderators in love with my style or I don't know... Well they feature almost 100% of my projects there and once I've started to appear in first place as a suggestion to follow for those newcomers who just join Behace after that followers numbers started to grow in geometrical progression.

Yeah, this is a true story of SM these day. Huge community doesn't mean active community. By the way, mesa not dead, mesa not a ghost :) Found you yesterday.

:) Haha! Glad mesa is not dead! Nice to meet you!

LOL freaking love your hilarious cartoons. I have you in SOLA as well.

Thank you :) How do you find SOLA by the way? Is it promising? I am not sure about their mechanics showing random cards... I think it is strange. Reminds me of one strange app where you can send any image or photo to the stranger without knowhing who will see it and you can get an answer from different one.

To be honest, so far, it's not convincing me. Saw someone placing Pawel K.'s work unauthorized. I don't like other's making a profit from someone else's work. I'm keeping an eye on other places. I'll keep you in mind if I find another suitable place.

This is the second strange thing there but I guess they will do something with that. Well... anyway for the blog this platform is ideal for me :)

Your post illustrations are hilarious! :D This gets you yet another follower. ;)

Haha! Thank you so much, Marieta! You have wonderful photos!

Wow I didn't know about Spectacles for steemit so thanks for showing this to us! Also, I think if the content is good, the followers will come and your illustrations are amazing!

Looks like it is down for now but hope it will be alive soon. Very useful stats are there. Thank you very much!

I follow successful people on steemit because I think success is contagious.But you are right,I own a news website in Uganda www.mycampusjuice.com,I also opened up a facebook page for it,but whenever i post a news post on the page http://facebook.com/campusjuice/, I receive just 20 visitors of the 20,000 plus who like my page.
The only solution is to post in a number of groups to get some reasonable traffic for my site.

I also subscribed to We are social media site https://wersm.com/, and I read an article that emphasized the same building a clean community based on people who really like your works,this can be done by starting a group on facebook of people who really are too much into your product

This is somthing I also agree. We attract what we want and what we see around. If you are in a good company there are more chances you will do good things so in that sence this is wise and nothing bad to follow successful people.

Facebook and Instagram hides our posts to get some money from us. They tell me everyday "Fil, similar post from your friends bring of new 4200 views for just 12 bucks, do you want to try?"

Thanks for appreciation

I'd add that on social media you shouldn't care so much about 'building an audience' and care more about influencing people as that is a more sustainable.

Very good addition, agree with you, thanks!

Nice art work dear... i also deal with art stuffs, but it seems i have not started yet. 😳

Thanks! Why you have not started? Life is short!

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Great illustrations.

Haha! Glad you're alive and thanks for the prove!
Like from Fil Dunsky

It's the same with YouTube. I have 26k subscribers but very few of the actually watch my videos or interact. I don't care how many followers I have anymore, but I try to interact as good as I can with those who comment and engage.

Really? I don't develop youtube channel yet and not sure if I will do it in future but this is really make sense. Anyway it's great to have dTube here on top of Steem so we all can benefit from it as well!

Very interesting analysis.
I myself am a music producer, and haven't shared my steemit links to any of my followers.
I believe that if my followers somehow get onto steemit one day, then they'll find me here, but there's no point to get them to follow a complex platform like this one (like asking an iPhone user to use an Android phone to follow you on YouTube i guess 😂)

Anyhow, I'm slowly building my following here, never asking for it, but just building a crowd out of pure interests. But good luck with your future my friend!

Haha! This is so true that you say!
The reason why I am inviting my people here because I know they have a potential to produce high quality posts, contribute their skills to the open source community and add some more value to the platform by themselves. But in other sense you're right :)

In my case Steemit became first and only real art blog. I never done such a things though I wanted to do that but I had no time telling people stories about my works etc. Now it is like my childhood dream coming true. I can draw e.g. commercials and write about it or I can write anything and draw it :)

You sir definitely won a follower! I'm looking forward to seeing more of your work!

Haha! Thanks a lot! :)
I appreciate you!

I appreciate your indepth knowledge of vital issues concerning steemit. Now I know more about followership and the rest.

Glad to help :)

That's the case with my friend's account.
He said he has around 200~ followers, but that only probably 10-30 of them are actually ever engaged in any of his content.

While that may not seem like a big deal to you.. I'd love to have even 8 loyal followers lol. I've gained a few, actually, but I'm still new, so there's much work to be done!

Great post and it's so true.. Numbers generally don't mean much, especially when you look at the facts and statistics on what those numbers even mean..

Thank you and good luck with your part time blogging job :)

Congrats anyway and I love your illustrations, they are so cute!

Thanks a lot! Nice to hear that!

Very true

Follow from @dunsky

Great post! I have thought about this often and agree that there is not much value in the number of followers. Ultimately it comes down to building a community and interacting and providing value for people. You can do this on any platform but steemit especially works well for this.

Absolutely! :)

Another great post from You Fil !
I like how you took the time to do the math. I admire that, since me, when it comes to math i look like this red octopus of yours ! :-D
Anyhow, thanks for this post, i learned from it!
I tought i did something wrong when i first noticed how my facebook followers are acting like dead ones. etc.. :-(
:-)

Haha, thank you, Agnes! Well, yeah, I love maths actually. I even thought I will become a programmer when I was choosing a university. But this is not a big deal maths actually :) 1+1=2 :)

Just followed you on Behance, you got some great works there bro!

Nice to hear that form a professional :) thanks a lot! By the way, can you point out which of them are great? Or maybe few best from you choice if you have time?

Sure,
My Way Home
Road Safety
From Me to You
Who are you?

These popped out for me the most, most likely because I saw them as the most worked on, what I think your works can benefit from is to have a bit more texture.

For instance, the background of the cat has a really nice texture that gives it weight and depth. While the cat looks too clean despite having the furry texture. I think a bit more noise would do some magic. If you do this in PS, just add like 2-3% noise and see if you like it.
But then again this is my preference.

Cool, thanks a lot for your choice! It is always hard for me to choose and to see from aside when it is needed. And for the textures good point, I am working on that right now! :)

My favorite is when they write me " keep going" !!
like i was some hobby artist not a professional for many years! :-)

Haha! I just saw similar comment given to @mrblinddraw in his posts. Somebody said to him something like "Very good, soon you will make it even better, keep learning" :) Though it's fun and maybe insulting but at the same time we should not stop learning and should listen to such a comments as well.

Good post @dunsky

Very good comment!

Wow - the Behance numbers!
But maybe that's what our Facebook numbers would be too if those morons allowed more than 5000 friends...

I've never been on Behance because as someone who has to look at job applications I hate it. And I love ArtStation. :) I suppose it's great for you, for finding ad work... but for people looking for full time employment as artists I don't recommend it. When I have to go through 50 bad artist applicants to maybe find 1 good one (every two weeks or so lol), I don't want directories... plus ArtStation has bigger thumbnails, packed closer... yeah whatever, it's a minor gripe, and hopefully in the future everyone's on Steemit and won't have to work fulltime anymore. :)

Yes, maybe that could be so with FB. Your art is really strong and it is much more suitable for ArtStation rather than Behance I guess. I was thinking about to have ArtStation portfolio as well but still hesitating because I think my style and "skills" will not fit there.

Thanks! Sorry forgot to mention, love your art! It should be on ArtStation too... I know, I know, the front page is full of that one single style because that's "glamorous" right now... (little do they realize the real money is in advertising) But if you sort by "Latest" and "Illustration", or "Comic Art" you get to see some more variety. And they can sort it in directories too if you need it. Anyway, have a good one!

Thanx for this informative post, it really helps someone like me who is just starting out on steemit, I need posts like this to figure out how to use the site better.

You're welcome!

Steem spectacles doesn't seem to work for me. Getting this error message...
Error: The WS connection was closed before this operation was made

Looks like it's down for now.

I'm new to Steemit. What do you think the best way to find a quality community would be- posting or commenting?

You will probably make more friends by commenting. Keeping everything you do interesting is the hard bit. I stick to commenting about stuff I know about so I'm on topic. If someone finds your comment interesting they are more likely to visit your blog so it gives your blog more chance of growing in value. About 85% of what I do is comment only 15% posting. That works for me because I find it hard to think about something to post whereas to comment the prompt is already there, I only have to find something that I'm interested in on my feed, There are lot's of different topics so you should be able to find something you like.

I think it's both. In sense of blockchain posts and comments are equal :)

You may a good job in your Steemit blog and 10 years is great inspriance in your niche.

And what can you said about Fiverr do you work there and do you plan in future make step by step posts and videos or You tube channel?

Fiverr? Never heard about it. For sure I will start doing step by step videos and post it here. There is a thing like @dtube allowing us to upload videos here in Steem blockchain. Soon I will show you something :)

Interesting article thanks ... There will be useful information for the future. And with stickers, you have a great idea.

Интересная статья спасибо... Будет полезная информация на будущее. А со стикерами вы здорово придумали..

Спасибо :)

this was a very good article and very helpful... thank you for taking the time to write it and helped us newer guys how to find out about other sites here. Thanks again

Thank you, Dave!

Great post! I totally agree, I'll rather have less followers that actually follow because they are interested in me and my work, rather than those just following for me to follow back (and then maybe unfollow). That is especially very visible on instagram. Let's keep it real and follow the people that inspires us! :)

Yes, here also! Once they follow and in a week or so same users unfollow because I didn't followed back :)


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Wow! Thanks a lot! My bitshares address is do-illustration