avatarDavid B. Clear

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Newbie Writers! Here’s Why Follow-for-Follow Is a Pointless Waste of Time

And why it might even be counterproductive

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Remember that kid from high school? The one that tried waaaay too hard to make friends? The one that was so annoyingly clingy they made you feel like a koala bear crawling out of a bowl of Viagra pills was about to hug your face? That’s how you come across when you try to grow an audience with a follow-for-follow strategy on any writing platform that shows a little number under your profile.

You see, the harder you try to make friends, the needier you come across and the less likely you are to actually make some friends. This is an example of what’s commonly known as the Law of Reversed Effort or Backwards Law. It states that for some things, the harder you try, the less likely you are to succeed.

For example, the harder you try to fall asleep, the more anxious you become, which makes sleep more and more elusive; the harder you try to remember something that’s on the tip of your tongue, the harder and harder it becomes to retrieve that darn memory; and the more you obsess about happiness, the more you’ll focus on what you lack and the less happy you’ll be.

Some things, it turns out, are only accomplished if you don’t try to pursue them directly. Forget about falling asleep and you’ll relax enough to soon doze off. Stop trying to remember the name of that actor who played the volleyball who saved Private Ryan and it’ll suddenly pop into your head when you’re taking a dump. Stop making a concerted effort to be happy and you’ll stop chasing the things you lack and start accepting your ordinary life as it is, which is the first step towards long-term happiness.

And gaining a stadium full of followers who scream your name when you and your words appear on stage is also among the things you’d better not chase directly — and that’s especially true if your idea of gaining followers is to trade follows as if they were marbles or Pokémon cards on a schoolyard.

So let me explain why willy-nilly following random users on the writing platform of your choice in the hopes that they’ll follow you back is not only a waste of time but is going to harm your chances of finding readers and fans. And yes, that’s true even if each one of the random users you followed ends up following you back.

The flawed idea behind follow-for-follow

Here’s how follow-for-follow is supposed to work.

You create a brand new account on BabbleBarn (or whatever your favorite writing platform is called), scroll around a little, and quickly run into the big boy writer profiles that have big numbers under their mugshots. At this point, you can’t help but start comparing your little number with the big bulging numbers of those who have been on the platform for years. That’s when you start feeling a sense of inadequacy and embarrassment while looking down at your own tiny follower count.

So you hop on Google and search “how to quickly increase your BabbleBarn follower count?” And that’s when you find this incredible hack: follow-for-follow. How does it work? Easy. Just hop back onto BabbleBarn and when you see a follow button, click it. And when you see another, click that one too. And keep clicking follow buttons as if you were playing whack-a-mole.

And then, after an hour, when your mouse finger is all cramped up, wait. Wait for the wave of notifications you’ve generated with all those follow clicks to spread through BabbleBarn. And when it’s reached all corners of the platform, some of the users receiving your notifications will be curious and check out your profile. And some of them will follow you back.

Hooray! Your first followers!

Now go back to playing FOLLOW ALL THE THINGS! And for good measure, barge into the comment section of random posts and leave a trail of “Oh God! Oh please, dear God! PLEEEEEEASE follow me!!! I’ll promise I’ll follow you back!!!”

And it’ll work. You will gain followers this way. But it’ll be utterly pointless. And here’s why.

Follow-for-follow hurts your reputation and credibility

Let’s say you opened one too many beer bottles with your teeth and now have a tooth oozing with pus that really needs to be checked out by a professional dentist. And let’s say you are new in town and don’t know any dentists there.

So how do you find one? Well, you could go to an online dentist directory such as FlossBossesAndGargleGurus.com or whatever, enter the name of your town in the search box, and then begin to scroll through the profiles of the dentists that show up.

Now, if FlossBossesAndGargleGurus provided follower numbers for the dentists it lists, you’d probably begin by checking out those who have the biggest follower numbers. And let’s say among them is Dr. Molar. He seems promising and so you check him out. That’s when you stumble upon a comment he left on another dentist’s post. It reads “Great post! I am a dentist too! Please follow me! I’ll follow you back!” Intrigued, you look into some more of his comments. And, well, they are all the same. It’s him begging for followers.

Would you go to that dentist? Or would you rather go to one that has fewer followers, but never begged for them nor ever engaged in any follow-for-follow shenanigans? I know where I’d go and it’s not the one giving off Viagra face-hugging koala vibes.

If you feel the same, then don’t commit the same mistake as a writer. Remember, as a writer, your reputation and credibility are among your most valued assets. And you are severely harming them by trying to shortcut audience growth by playing silly follow-for-follow games. After all, they just signal to everyone that you are a desperate newbie who can’t attract an audience through merit—a newbie who needs to resort to spammy hacks to get any attention whatsoever.

Follow-for-follow is a distraction

Here’s what you should be doing as a writer. You should write. You should read. You should experiment with different genres. You should listen to podcasts. You should talk to people. You should go on nature walks. You should keep a journal. You should travel. You should learn more about the world. You should build genuine relationships with editors and fellow writers. You should live a life worth telling about — a life that inspires you.

That’s a lot of stuff to be doing. And that means if you are serious about becoming a writer, you don’t have time to waste on nagging people for follows and playing follow-button whack-a-mole.

Follow-for-follow might get you banned

This doesn’t apply to all writing platforms, but some of them frown so much on their users trying to game their system that they’ll downright ban you if they detect too many artificial interactions with other users from you.

For instance, here are some of the behaviors that, according to its rules, might get you banned from a writing platform that rhymes with helium and tedium:

— Performing a disproportionately large number of interactions, particularly by automated means. This includes bulk or indiscriminate interactions, such as following of other accounts (follow spam), clapping, highlighting, leaving notes, or flagging content — Repeatedly using responses, mentions, or other interactions as a method of promotion or marketing — Participating in bounty campaigns or brigades to artificially inflate rankings for posts, accounts, businesses, or products

Follow-for-follow will get you penalized by algorithms

Even if follow-for-follow is not against the rules of a certain platform, they might still penalize you.

You see, social media and writing platforms are businesses that make money by keeping their readers hooked — by keeping them on the platform. That’s why they hire a whole bunch of computer engineers to endlessly tweak algorithms. And these algorithms are looking for one thing and one thing only: writing that grips readers by their reading balls and doesn’t let them go.

Algorithms, though, are too dumb to recognize that sort of writing directly. They can’t read, after all. So they find gripping writing by looking for proxy signals — things that are easier to measure and strongly correlate with what humans tend to devour.

Here are some of these signals:

  • Click-through rate: this is the number of users who click on a story out of the total number of users who saw the story in their feed. So if 100 people saw a story in their feed but only 20 clicked on it, the click-through rate would be 20/100 = 0.2.
  • Bounce rate: this is the number of users out of the total number of users who clicked on a story who immediately left it again instead of staying to read it. So if out of 100 readers who clicked on a story 85 spent less than three seconds on it, the bounce rate would be 85/100 = 0.85.
  • Engagement rate: this is the number of users out of the total number of users who clicked on a story who then proceeded to leave a comment, like it, re-share it, highlight it, or otherwise engage with it. So if 100 people clicked on a story and then only 30 engaged with it in some way, the engagement rate would be 30/100 = 0.3.
  • Retention rate: this is the number of users who keep coming back for more. It may be measured for the whole platform or for individual profiles. So if you have 100 followers but only 10 of them keep coming back to your profile to check out more stories from you, you have a retention rate of 10/100 = 0.1.

Now, you know what sort of followers won’t click through to any of your stories? Or, if they click through, will immediately bounce and not engage with them? What sort of followers aren't interested in you and will never come back to see what else you have posted on your profile? That’s right. Followers who only followed you because you followed them.

Those are followers who don’t care two flying frogs about your writing. And if they aren't interested in your writing, they will be sending screamingly loud proxy signals to the algorithms that you are a crappy writer that is not worth promoting to anyone else. They will be giving you a low click-through rate, a high bounce right, a low engagement rate, and a low retention rate. And that's definitely not what you want.

So as a writer on any writing platform that’s driven by recommender algorithms, you’re better off having 500 followers who click on every story you post, engage with every single one of them, never bounce, and always keep coming back for more, than having 50,000 followers who completely ignore you.

The 500 followers will tell the algorithm that you are a highly engaging writer who should be ramped down everyone’s feed. The latter, meanwhile, will just tell the algorithm that you are a dud who for some inexplicable reason has a bunch of followers but that should be shamefully hidden from any eyeballs.

Remember, there was a time when cheap hacks worked — a time when you could plaster the keywords “fart” and “husband” in white text over a white background over and over and then rank first on Google when a housewife with a gas mask clicked on the search box and typed “Why does my husband fart so much?” But Google is no longer this dumb. It’s no longer 1998. And just like Google wised up, so have the algorithms powering modern writing platforms. So don’t believe decades-old growth hacks. They don’t work. Not anymore. Most likely, they’ll harm you.

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