All Posts · Blogging

Why the Amount of Followers You Have is Meaningless

Fairen

You may have read the article I wrote on how to get more followers using WordPress. Today, I’m going to completely contradict what I said.

wordpress bike

In the previous article, I talked about using engagement to increase your follower count and today I’m going to tell you that your meet around tablefollower count is meaningless.

While the amount of followers you have can be useful, I believe that it really doesn’t matter.

Coming back from a blogging break means noticing some differences. One of the first differences I picked up is the focus shift.

When I first began blogging, it was all about the follower count. Now, it is about how many people are active on your site. Maybe this is because of the “follow” button is at the bottom of the page, now. Who actually knows?

The purpose of me saying this is to tell you don’t freak out over your followers.

girl freaking out

Let me say that again.

Don’t freak out over how many followers you have.

Why? Generally speaking, it doesn’t matter.

What truly matters is how you utilize the followers you do have. Do you provide great content or services? Do you involve your followers? How active are your followers on your site?

What mattered even a year ago for some opportunities holds almost no value today- at least, not to the WordPress community.

guest bloggingBuilding a following here differs from other platforms in that it isn’t about the followers anymore. In fact, one (sometimes faulty) way I know the approximate following of a person and what their blog is about is through the comment and “like” section.

When I ask people to be guests on our “show,” I look at how interesting is their work and do they reply to their comments. This is really a determining factor in almost all my blogging endeavors.

mariah carey singing
Just Mariah Carey Performing!

This is important to recognize because anyone can hit the follow button and we can all play the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” game.
But if you can intrigue an audience, that’s really something. Moreover, if you treat your audience like you value them, that leads me to believe that you’ll treat my audience the same way!

And friends, that means the world to me.

So, feel free to take a peek at your follower count but take a chill pill (or a sip
of your favorite tea) and focus on creating value, reading others post, and interacting on both your platform and theirs.tea

That is, unless you blog for other personal reasons – there is no shame in that either. 😀

11 thoughts on “Why the Amount of Followers You Have is Meaningless”

  3. I’ve been doing this for less than three months, and decided early on not to make my “Follower” count visible — at first out of a desire to avoid comparison, but soon after, because I concluded that it just doesn’t matter. I think you’re right that people do — even without overt agreement — follow those who follow them. But why, except to serve the numbers? It can’t be that they’re reading all of each other’s posts. There simply aren’t enough hours in a day.

    On my first day here, I read some advice on blogging time management. (I hate that word — “blogging”. It makes me think of a clumsy cow slogging through a sludge of clumpy molasses, slowly sinking into the slurpy muck and mire, never to be seen again — only sticky-thick bubbles blurping open like Fantasia lava, marking the poor creature’s syrupy slide into oblivion.) Huh. Anyway, the advice said to limit the time you spend reading other people’s posts to 5 minutes a day.

    5 minutes a day. HOW?! I’ve already spent 15 minutes commenting here.

    I think we all know how: It’s anonymously easy to hit “like” in the Reader without ever reading a post or going to the page. As far as I know, the poster can’t tell the difference. Only commenting leaves evidence that you truly were there. It seems to me that most sites with thousands of followers receive mostly “I agree” type responses. And, although sycophantic comments aren’t engaging, at least they seem to indicate the commenter might have read the post.

    Writing takes thought. Honest writing leaves a writer vulnerable to opposing views or admiration or vilification. I’ve read enough here to know that we all believe we know how to write; I know enough about good writing to know many of us are deluded. Not a problem — we keep practicing and our skills improve. So say the professional writers.

    I don’t want to see this very personal activity as a competition or a statistical motherlode, so I never check my “stats”. Honest. Yet before long, the WordPress algorithm put like and follower information in my notifications as if they were milestones I should be proud of. I resist sharing them.

    I apologize, Felicia, for leaving a post-length comment. It’s difficult for me to turn my back on “Tell me What you Think!” Of course, once I put it out there, I’d like to know what your and any of those who read this might think, too. After all, that’s the reason we write, right?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Haha blogging is an odd word and I appreciate you taking so much time to comment, here!☺ Don’t apologize, I love long comments. What do I think? I think that I’m a bit different on this. I didn’t (and still don’t) come in because I was a great writer or even to work on it. Hence, why you don’t see me giving writing advice lol. I actually came from the motive of seeing others build a following and thinking that I could do that too. Boy, so much has changed! My writing has drastically improved and I’m here for less selfish reasons (most of the time- I am human).

      So because of my original reasons for coming here and because the stat button is in front of a competitive person, it is extremely easy to make this about follower count. Then too, I received very little respect from family in the beginning so perhaps that contributed as well.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Personal growth is a wonderful reason to pursue any activity — no matter what our original motivation was. I look forward to seeing where your journey takes you.

        Like

  4. I don’t look at the number of followers I have necessarily, I also look at the number of views and visitors I have to my blog. Why just the other day I got a notification from wordpress on my phone that said that my stats were booming. I had over 2200 views and 900 or so visitors to my blog. My guess is that I must be doing something right.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Tell me What you Think!