On Building a Blogging or Social Media Following

How do you build a social media account?

In this case, I would include our accounts here on Blurt.

Sure there is a certain value in creating original content, and creating something that has some kind of value to people. In this particular context I would say that something having value is potentially more important than straight quality.

What I mean by that, for example, is that professional White Papers often have quality but they don't have much value to the average reader.

But that's not really the most important thing.

Although I am by no means an influencer, nor do I have any huge social media accounts, to the degree that I have managed to build follower bases in the thousands or even in the tens of thousands it has all come through engaging with other people.

And when I say "engaging" — in a blogging and content creation context — I mean a little bit more than your basic thumbs up or writing "great post" underneath somebody's efforts. In fact, the latter puts off a lot of people.

Engagement matters because ultimately most human beings just want to feel heard and seen. So when you leave a comment on somebody's post that actually references something you found interesting about their post, it makes that person feel heard or seen. A genuine connection is made.

Which brings up the important point of being authentic. In this particular context — since I'm fond of using that expression! — the implication is also that perhaps you're best served by limiting your engagement to the content that is authentically interesting to you.

In building my original account on Steemit, I always found so-called "whale fishing" to be a particularly useless exercise. Whereas I would occasionally get a substantial whale upvote on some piece of content, it was not something I deliberately went hunting for.

My point here being that what you want to try to do is to build an authentic follower base who are actually reading your content because they find it worthwhile and they value it, not just try to rack up a number of one-off moon shots that may reward you handsomely once and then never look at you again.

In a sense, it's just a variation of "slow but steady wins the race!"

I have only recently returned to blogging on Blurt, so I'm going to take the slow but steady approach to start following people who create content that is actually of interest to me. It may not be the fastest way to go, but I figure it'll be steady in the long run.

Thanks for stopping by and reading today's musings, and I hope to see you again!

How about YOU? Do you have a successful strategy for building a following? Do you think engagement matters? DO leave me a comment — engagement matters! Communities are built because people INTERACT with each other through the content that's created! This is SOCIAL media, after all. So share your opinion, be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer all worthy comments!

Sequence: 091 — Timestamp: 2025.02.18 - 23:47 PST

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