Follow-for-Follow
Dishonest practice or useful marketing tool?
Everyone on Medium is familiar with the follow-for-follow (F4F) debate.
Some (generally newbies with few followers) employ it without reservation, rationalizing that F4F is the quickest and easiest way to build a reader base from scratch and get past the Medium 100-follower hurdle to enter the Partnership Program. This is obviously true. Arriving onto the Medium scene without a following thrusts you into a stone-cold, lonely existence, and F4F is an effective method to get established here.
Others (generally established writers with large, established fan bases) look down their noses at F2F. They claim that F4F is dishonest and phony because followers acquired through the scheme are unthinkingly clicking the Follow button, regardless an author’s writing quality.
I tend to side with the former view, especially when initially getting established. When I first arrived here, the silence was, indeed, deafening. After I wrote my first story and published it, the thing just sat there like a tissue discarded along the Medium highway.
Damn, it was cold!
Right about the time I was starting to doubt my investment of time and money, a story dropped into my RECOMMENDED FOR YOU tab. Its catchy title ignited a tiny…
