"I'm Rewarded For My Engaging Content!"

almost 3 years ago

When it comes to social media posting and writing articles, it might be important to think about how you write as your goal should be to engage with your audience. I have previously explained why engagement is vital for Hive and communities so I won't talk about that this time, but I will say this:

The more engagement you have on a post, the bigger the reach.

The greater the reach – the more comments, shares/reblog and likes/upvotes you'll get, which obviously equates to more rewards and a larger audience. You probably have some sort of goal on Hive, but at least one of your goals should be to focus on your audience and to grow the amount of followers you have. This can be done in many different ways, but one of the smartest moves is to reward your audience whenever they leave a comment on your articles. Nothing beats real engagement and everyone likes to be rewarded.

However, rewards can be more than just $ and tokens. An upvote worth 0 can be seen as a reward, because it's an act from someone who seems to enjoy your contribution. I am obviously not talking about auto-votes in this scenario, as that is passive and doesn't involve any form of manual work whatsoever.

I enjoyed onealfa's post "0.01% vs 100%" very much. Not only because I liked the idea he shared, but also due to all the engagement. The engagement was great with 115 comments in total at the time I am writing this and I went a bit back- and forth with other awesome users in the comment section.

One of the things sort of inspired me a bit so I'll use that as an inspiration to explain my thought process about rewards..

This is one of my replies from that post:

"A small upvote from a whale is still a whale vote, but people will be curious to know why they received such a low valued vote. I think it's a great idea, and I can definitely see how this would actually change the behaviour or some people."

I strongly believe in the fact that people are here for the money before anything else and I have been here long enough to have witnessed a lot of different things. For instance, the results or should I say consequences of auto-votes from whales and other heavily invested stakeholders.

We have seen it happen many times in the past. An author who seems to produce an average of 1 or 2 articles per day starts to share 4 articles per day as soon as they figure out that they have been able to land on the "lucky-list" of a whale that starts to auto-vote whatever they publish.

We have often seen quantity increase and quality decrease due to those votes. That wouldn't have been the case if those people weren't here mainly for rewards and money. Just because you hold long-term doesn't change the fact that you are here for the sake of money.

Anyhow, we want engagement and that is likely to come from effort. I say effort instead of quality, as a funny meme could rake in thousands of comments. A meme isn't very likely to give you ideas for new topics to write about or great discussion though, and that wouldn't be "rewarding" for anyone but the author if we're talking about rewards in form of money.

If you look at onealfa's post "0.01% vs 100%", you can clearly see how much he rewards his audience by upvoting the comments. Some more and others less, but he makes sure to make his audience be seen and/or heard in one way or another. @taskmaster4450 is great at this as well. Comments in his own articles, comments in other people's content and comments within the @leomarkettalk posts are being upvoted left and right. An awesome way to spread some love & tokens around the community.

That being said, we're still talking about rewards in form of money. Comments are another type of reward. Make a comment and tell the author what you think about his content. That goes a very long way most times and for someone who is rather new, it can be game changing for them. That single comment can be the only thing someone needs to decide to stay and continue to put in more effort over time.

Reblog/share the article with your audience or on Twitter/Facebook etc. That's another amazing thing you can do to reward the author. How about doing both? - Make a comment & reblog..

The point I am trying to make is that rewards are far more than just $ or tokens. In fact, most people who comes to Hive have never earned a single cent from any of their content before, so they are used to not getting paid. They are used to be rewarded in other ways.

However, we also have people who are trying to establish themselves further. They want to improve their reputation, credibility, writing skills or whatever.. And they want to grow their stakes as well.

If a full whale vote (I use that as an example because a vote from a whale has huge impact), has a value of 100 LEO/Hive/POB or whatever and they decide to manually vote and they reward content with 1 LEO/Hive/POB instead of 100, it should work as encouragement and it should motivate users to improve even further. It's definitely a token of appreciation and it shows that a whale has noticed you.. Instead of being sad about the value not being 100 for that specific vote, be encouraged and think about the reason for the upvote. Think about the why.

Why did they give you an upvote worth 1 instead of 100?
Why 10 instead of 100? Why 50 instead of 100?

It could be as simple as the curator wants to spread the tokens far and wide. He might want to rewards as many users as possible without spending too much of his voting power.

It could also be because he appreciate the effort you put in, but he wants to see more from you. It can be because he likes the content but not to such an extent that he thinks it's worth the full vote..

There could be several reasons for that specific vote and I wouldn't recommend analyzing it too much, but I think it's a great chance for you to actually think about how you write, or what you write.

Use it as fuel to improve. That way you stay encouraged and motivated which is vital for your own success on Hive. Despair, anxiety and miserable won't lead you to anything good, so stay positive.

You just caught the attention of a whale. Now it's time to lure them in. You might not taste that juicy whale-vote this time, but there's always a tomorrow and you need to remember that.

More than anything else though, you need to remember that rewards are more than $ and that Hive is nothing like a get rich quick scheme. It takes time, hard work and effort.

Be grateful for all the rewards. Everything builds up over time.