I have been ignoring this for a long time, but today I want to talk about the resteem bots. From what I can tell they are an annoying irritant whose messages clutter up my wallet feed.
However part of having an open and critical mind is not accepting preconceived notions you might have, so I'm prepared to listen to those of you whom have used one and have got some kind of benefit from them.
First of all though, I will list what I think about them and then we can go from there.
The Good
Increased Revenue:
OK, so at one point, when the Steem price was just under a couple of dollars (oh the good old days!), a resteem from me seemed to be worth about $5.
However it very much depended on when it was resteemed. A good article that had I did within a few hours of posting, often got that five dollar boost.
Sometimes, if it was a really good article, I could post 24 hours later and it would still get that boost of five bucks.
It wasn't an exact science, and articles that I resteemed that I thought were great did not get the revenue boost.
Extra Exposure:
Of course if you are a new user and your article gets shown to potentially thousands, or even tens of thousands of users. Then that is going to speed up your exposure a lot more than if you try and reach that many people organically.
Plus of course if you get resteemed by somebody who is in your niche. Or at the very least has written similar articles to the one you've just posted, you stand a chance of picking up some new fans.
Trending Possibilities:
This is an outside chance, with the trending page being dominated by paid bot content, it is unlikely that a resteem will raise enough revenue to break onto the trending page.
Though it might appear somewhere lower down, so we can't rule it out as a possible benefit.
The Bad
False Followers:
A lot of these resteem bots claim to have tens of thousands of followers, indeed if you go to their pages you see that the numbers match their claims. However, a lot of these accounts have multiple resteem bots.
Therefore if they can be bothered to do that, they can be bothered to set up lots of fake accounts to follow themselves.
Low Engagement Followers:
Even if the resteem bot is honest and is trying to get real followers. There is a very real chance that these are people who will not engage that much.
They are often new follow-4-follow users and in my experience, those are the lowest grade of user. Simply because they have followed everyone, and the chances of getting a concentration of people who are genuinely interested in your resteems I think is low.
Low Standard Resteem Response:
I can tell you that somebody who has over 7700 followers, the standard response rate is about 0.5% to 1.5%.
That figure represents the people who regularly vote and comment on my articles. Which I would assume are the same people who would see any resteems that I made.
I've studied other highly followed users and this response rate seems to be fairly standard. For instance @papa-pepper one of the most popular Steemians on the platform has around 21,000 followers and gets around 300 votes per article. Which is roughly 1.5%
@nanzo-scoop has around a 10% response rate (circa 12,000 followers, circa 1200 votes per article), however he runs regular well funded competitions.
Cost:
This is the one that annoys me the most, these resteem services charge you for the privilege. And unlike the bid bots, they promise you nothing in return but a lousy resteem.
At least with a bid bot you have a chance of making your money back, or even making a profit on your initial outlay.
With a resteem bot, that's it, you pay your money, you get a resteem and nothing else is promised. You might get extra votes, perhaps you'll get one or two more comments, no promises though!
The Ugly
Not A Great Way To Curate:
A while back I thought to myself; 'Aha! I should follow a few of these resteem bots, that way they are doing the work for me. I just have to check their pages now and again and they'll feed me loads of great Steemians to follow.'
Unfortunately this is not the case. Whilst there may be some great content that is resteemed. Most of the content is of poor quality, and has that same copy-n-paste, stale feel to it.
Therefore it is not a great curation tool because the good stuff is buried deep and you have to wade through lots of very low value posts to find it.
They Spam People:
I am yet to meet a person who has said to me; 'you know what? I don't mind spam, in fact I kinda like it.'
Nobody likes spam, it is annoyingly repetitive, and feels pointless. I feel nothing but anger and resentment to people who spam me. Therefore why would you want to associate yourselves with something, or someone that is actively annoying thousands of people everyday?
They Don't Work!:
When you go to one of these resteem bot pages, there seems to be a recurring theme. The posts with the most votes and/or the most rewards, are using other voting bidbots to get those votes and rewards!
The posts that do not use any other form of promotion but the resteem bot, are making next to nothing. They have no extra engagement on their posts and hardly any extra votes.
In other words, they have completely wasted their money.
Resteems That Are Likely To Work
If I go to a page that I like to read their content, I am much more likely to click on their resteems. Especially if those reposts are of the same subject matter as the person who I have originally come to see.
I don't resteem that often, but when I do it is because I either believe in the project. Really like the content, or they do something similar to me and I just feel like giving them a small boost.
So engage with other people on their blogs, talk about what you do in Discord and on Steemit, and the resteems will come. When they do, you'll find that you'll get a lot more from it, than when you pay someone 0.7 SBD to resteem your post to their inattentive/dead followers.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? ARE RESTEEM BOTS WORTH IT? HAVE YOU EVER USED ONE? DO YOU USE ONE AT THE MOMENT? WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS (IF ANY) YOU HAVE GAINED FROM WORKING WITH THESE ACCOUNTS?
AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title image: dylan nolte on Unsplash
