Writing

Read This Before Doing a Follow-to Follow

Should you do it?

Image Credit: Gil Ribeiro on Unsplash

If you are unfamiliar with what a follow-to-follow system is on Medium, it’s when people follow your account in hopes that you will follow them too. Usually, people do this to quickly meet the 100-follower requirement to qualify for the Medium Partner Program.

I had reservations when I first heard about this system. I’ve been warned not to do this on social media.

Follow-to-follow schemes, I’ve been told, are bad for many reasons, including:

• You’ll end up with followers that don’t care about your content.
• You likely won’t get a lot of comments or other types of engagement.
• You’ll look desperate.
• You’ll trap yourself in an endless cycle of following everybody that follows you.
• People will unfollow you once they get what they want (i.e., you follow their account)
• And so on.

But my curiosity and hardheadedness struck one day, and I bit the bullet. I participated in a follow-to-follow challenge on someone’s account here on Medium. The challenge was to get 100 followers in 48 hours.