#increasing follower count

There’s been a lot of talk in writeblr recently (and for a while now) about the importance of interacting with other people’s posts beyond just dropping a like and keep scrolling, and while that is important for helping creators grow their reach, there are actually a few things you can do yourself that can also help. 

*note: this is in no way meant to replace the conversation about interacting with others, nor is it meant to blame creators for not having reach because that sentiment is toxic and unproductive. Rather, it’s tips creators can choose to impliment or not in addition to the ask that people do more to interact.

Anyyywaayyy...

1) Tag your shit 

Tumblr’s search algorithm works pretty much exclusively on tags (it’ll sometimes put things on your dash based on people you follow, but don’t rely on that). Basically, the more tags you put, the easier it is for people to stumble across.

The first five tags on your post will be the ones that will make your post show up in tags people follow (for example, if someone follows #writing advice and that tag is in your first five, it will show up in that person’s tracked tags). A general rule of thumb is to put popular tags in your first five. For writing, those might be (#writing, #writeblr, #spilled ink, #writing humor, #writing advice, etc). Which tags you choose will depend on the content of your post.

The first twenty tags (including the first five described above) will show up when you put something into the search bar. When it comes to these, do not hold back. The more tags you put, the more likely it is for someone to see it. Key think: make sure tags are relevant to your post. If you tag a post that’s an advice post about worldbuilding and tag it #writing memes, you’re not going to gain a lot of traction based off the tag because people will search that looking for -- you guessed it -- Writing memes! 

All tags on your post will show up in the blog navigation search bar, so if you have specific tags for say, original posts or something, the place to put that is often after your original twenty tags if you have a lot.

Another important thing: tags on reblogs don’t show up EXCEPT within a specific person’s blog! This is to keep popular duplicates from showing up in the main search engine but it also means that if you don’t have any tags on your post, the only way it’s going to get passed around is through reblogs and we’ve all heard how that’s going.

(more tips below the break)

Since the beginning of Twitter, success has been measured by followers. Whether or not this was the most effective way to measure how popular people or brands were, it fell into place partly to reflect the way Facebook success was measured. However, the two platforms are vastly different, so this measurement might not be entirely correct. If your company has hundreds of followers, do you really know how many of them are actively reading your tweets? According to recent inquiries into the matter, not many of them.

  There are half a billion accounts on Twitter. Ideally for your brand, this would mean that a half a billion people are signing into the site every day and reading their Twitter feed. Instead, there are only 140 million users signing in on a regular basis, and most of the half a billion users created an account and forgot about it.

  So, is counting your followers really a logical way to measure your success on Twitter? Definitely not, and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is trying to brainstorm ways to do it better. He suggested the dream metric, which is a measurement of how many people really see your Tweet. This is a great idea in theory, but how is that number even measured? Twitter doesn’t have the ability to measure the number of viewers for each Tweet, so other calculations will have to be used to arrive at this number.

  Soon enough, the number of followers for your personal or your company’s Twitter won’t matter. Though no decision has been reached on what will matter, the following options are being tossed around at the Twitter headquarters:

  Only Real Followers Counted

Though this is an obvious solution, it’s a tough one to swallow. Last year, Newt Gingrich was accused of getting fake followers in order to make himself seem more popular on Twitter. He battled these rumors successfully, and there was really no way to prove it either way. Followers are followers, and whether or not they were fake was not immediately obvious to fellow users. If Twitter suddenly changed up the game and only included active users in your followers, your numbers would drop significantly. Lady Gaga and Obama’s followers would drop by 70%.If you own a small company, you might have barely any followers left by the end of the switch.

  This might be an easy way to see how many people really read your Tweets and are actively involved with your brand on the site, but it’s such a huge switch that many Twitter users would be devastated. And, since there is nothing to compare these new numbers to, popularity would suddenly be impossible to gauge. Twitter might lose hundreds of users this way, and their goal is certainly not to bring the company down in flames. This is an option, but will be avoided if possible.

  Measure Success in Retweets

This option actually makes a little bit more sense. Instead of drastically altering the number of followers on each Twitter account, the founders could add a second metric, Williams’ “dream metric”, to display how many times a users’ posts were retweeted. So, if Lady Gaga tweets something and it is retweeted 100,000 times, that is an accurate way to see how many people read the original. If your company tweeted and it was retweeted 10 times, the popularity comparison is accurate. Sure, it’s sad, but 10,000 more people care about Lady Gaga than your company. Whether you like it or not, it’s an accurate measure of success and a good way to compare overall popularity.

  Again, this metric of measurement is accurate, but there’s another problem with it. Already, people say things like “RT if you like this” in the tweets as a way of asking people to retweet their thoughts. This is annoying now, and it will only get worse with the dream metric. People will begin posting for retweets instead of fans, and Twitter could lose thousands of followers fed up with the new popularity contest. The Twitter feed could become downright unreadable with cries for attention and irrelevant promotions.

  A Combination of the Two

Instead of moving to an entirely new system, Twitter does have the option to integrate these two new methods of measurement and combine it with the current follower count. Users and companies could keep their original follower count, which would include both active and inactive users, but could hide this number from the main page. That way, followers wouldn’t use it to determine the success of other users. In other words, hiding the followers would wean Twitter users off of their reliance on total followers as a measurement of success. They could also put it next to the number of active followers. However, it would be too easy to do the math, and it would be almost more embarrassing than only showing your active users.

  In addition to being an embarrassment, combining all three measurement metrics on a person or company’s Twitter page would start to make it look like a math problem. There would be too many totals, and people would only need to do simple math to see the flaws in the measurements of popularity that people are using.