Steemit Life: Are Your Dead Followers REALLY "Dead?"

in #steemit6 years ago (edited)

Lately, I have been playing around with some of the many new "toys" (apps) out there, which we can use to make the Steemit experience more fun and enjoyable.

In doing so, I have visited a number of different users' blogs — users I don't often come into contact with.

After visiting a few posts from long-term Steemian @stellabelle, I was checking out my followers using the "SteemSpectacles" site; possibly now the best alternative to @mynameisbrian's now defunct "Dead Followers" site.

As expected, close to HALF my followers are "dead." Quite a few more are "ghosts;" they are active on Steemit, but not actually visiting my blog.

091MagentaStuffofLife.jpg
This flower is NOT dead!

But how many are really dead?

I think what's important in this context is to consider that a good 90% of those "dead" followers appear to have between a couple and roughly 15SP to their credit. Of course, 15SP also happens to correspond to the "opening delegation" someone gets when creating an account through Steemit, Inc.

So basically, these would appear to be accounts of people who opened a Steemit account (perhaps at the recommendation of a friend), looked around a little bit (or not) and then never came back.

Does that really make them a dead follower?

From where I am sitting — which includes a lot of years in marketing and sales — they don't look like "dead followers" to me, as they were NEVER ALIVE, in the first place.

In marketing speak, those are more like "abandoned shopping carts," on commercial web sites.

So when we talk about Steemit's "retention problem," those probably should be removed from the equation, first, before people throw "dramatic and tragic numbers" up there for everyone to get alarmed over.

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Who are these ducks following?

The Importance of Knowing Your Followers!

The true "value" of examining your followers through an app like SteemSpectacles is to gain understanding who is active and engaging, and who is NOT.

I have long held that if you're an active social media users, how many followers you have is far less important than who those followers are.

And, unless you have an inordinately large amount of time and energy, odds are that few people can effectively "keep up" with more than about 150-200 people. So that should really be your focus, unless you're mass marketing some kind of product or service that's dependent on having massive reach for an "external" thing.

But Steemit (so far) is mainly an "internal focus" web site... whether by design, or just as a result of "how things turned out."

Besides, I can't even tell whether external people are reading my posts because we (a) do not have a page view counter and (b) there are no "by account" site analytics here. So even if I posted to my Facebook page and 2000 people came here to read the post, I would never know about it!

Anyway, with @steem-ua becoming more of a "thing," it's probably a good idea to go through the list of people you follow — especially if you've been here a long time — and "prune out" any truly dead followers, and any of those "minimum value" accounts you might have followed because they posted a promising introduction... and then nothing else.

Or even because — in a moment of madness — you were once upon a time caught up in follow-for-follow fever.

And yes, this stuff takes time. But ultimately... wouldn't you prefer your feed to just serve up recent content by people you actually care about? I know I would!

How about YOU? How many followers do you have? Do you know how many of them are still "alive?" Do you CARE about weeding out those who are no longer active? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

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Posted via @steempeak. If you haven't tried SteemPeak yet, you really owe it to yourself to give this "modern" view of Steemit a try! Just go to SteemPeak.com and give it a test drive!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created at 180907 23:25 PDT

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I remeber @pennsif doing a little 'experiment' about a year ago where he went round all his follwers and dropped in an upvote and a comment if they were posting. Obvs only those that weren't blatently not active or bots

It's an experiment I've been meaning to repeat for a while, even with spectacles its still the best way to do an accurate assessment!

As to do I care about the numbers - let's just say doing a 1000 follower celebration post probably has less validity than one celebrating turning 60 rep.

Posted using Partiko Android

That actually sounds like a really worthwhile thing to attempt! It's obviously an all-day project, but it might kick a little life into things.

I'm pretty much in favor of anything that can increase the engagement level here, which will help the retention level in the longer run.

I hear you on the celebrations... I'm inchworming my way towards a 70 rep which feels like a monumental landmark, given how slowly things move at this point. My current challenge is to see if I can get there before reaching 5K followers....

That's a pretty cool site. You might also enjoy http://steem.agency/

That's a pretty cool site, thanks for recommending it! I have added it to my bookmarks of "helper sites" for Steemit.

What I hate is the fact that I have large stakeholders who both follow me and are active on the platform, yet they never touch my posts.

Yeah, those are the "ghosts." Currently, about 50% of mine are "dead" but I also have 40% "ghosts," who are followers, active and never visit.

Seriously considering doing what @revisesociology was talking about in his comment. A lot of work, but possibly worthwhile.

that's an interesting site @denmarkguy. I've not come across that one before.

I went though my followers and unfollowed those who are dead although I suspect some of them might come back when the price of Steem goes up. Most of them had very good reputations and were good engagers up until 3 months ago.

The most depressing statistic was that of 1257 followers 1086 are ghost followers. 😱

I wish there was some way to take them out of the equation.

Over the last few months I have definitely lost a large number of people who used to engage but are no longer active.

I'm not a fan of UA as I think it favours those who got in early (as I've mentioned before I think). It seems like another "club" for those people who are already well supported.

Perhaps it will be too late anyway.

I'm not ready to be quite that glum, yet... I have a huge number of "ghosts" as well, leaving me with about 10% of my total followers as "active and current." Which — ironically — is pretty much the overall Steemit retention rate, as far as active accounts go.

You're possibly right about UA, although I've had a number of interactions with the creators and now they are at least starting to calculate and give more weight to "site activity" as part of the UA score... before, it really wasn't given significant weight.

It did sound a bit glum didn't it @denmarkguy? I hope what you say about UA "starting to calculate and give more weight to "site activity"" makes a difference. It's all a bit of a nonsense, I feel, if they don't. But there I go ahead. more glumness. Just call me Eeyore! 😂

Some people HAVE to be Eeyore! I'm often rather pessimistic, myself... and that helps the dreamers among us take a step back to consider whether they are about to fall through very thin ice into very cold water!

Well that's a very uneyeore like way to look at it @denmarkguy. 😂

Retention, retention, retention...the biggest problem for steemit (of active users, obviously)

The biggest problem we have, indeed. As far as I am concerned, tied to wildly unrealistic expectations. People hear they can "make money blogging" here and think that means posting a couple of cat photos and the $20 bills start raining down. Then they get all butthurt when it doesn't happen and call Steemit "a scam," totally forgetting that they get jack all posting to Facebook or Instagram.

Not so much.

Selective sense of reality...

I don't count the 15SPers as likely ever alive.

Nor do I. If your'e in any way active, you tend to get off that mark pretty fast... most decent "introduceyourself" posts tend to get at least $3-5, which means you are already at 17SP within a week.

And yet, very few are.

The ones I'd like to reach are the folks who "dabbled a bit," got to 30-50SP before deciding it was "too much work" and quitting. Probably a hard task, given that so many came here "just for the money" and an appeal that there's a cool social community will likely fall on deaf ears.

This is N encouragement for me to do this... finally. I’ve been on steemit since May 2017 and know I have followed accounts that are dead now. I also hadn’t heard of steem-ua. I went and read it but still am not totally sure what it does. Hahaha.

Posted using Partiko iOS

It does require a little "playing around with" to figure out what all the features are. I like the "ghost followers" feature, too... allows me to see who followed me, are still active here, btut evidently don't ever look at my content.

i try to keep to under 200, weed out the dead accounts and follow new accounts

I need to do a major walkthrough of all the people I follow and get rid of the "truly dead" ones... it's been almost 9 months since I last did any significant "housekeeping."

Steemspectacles is a great tool. I have just tried it to see how many inactive followers I have.

I only just learned about it a few days ago, when I discovered the old "dead followers" tool is no longer active... so I went in search of alternatives.

Wow..lovely post...really i love your all post..lovely photoshoot 📷.my dear friend denmarkguy

Thank you... appreciate the kind words.

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