Good post Preeti! It would be hilarious to get $100 for a picture of my ceiling fan! I'll give it a shot anyways in @sjennon's comment below.
Coming to your points other than checking the blockchain explorer or your follower list every day for a new follower there's no way to tell if someone is following you or not. No notification. Even in the blockchain explorer steemd.com if I remember correctly it won't show you if someone is following you. Steemdb.com does display this info correctly. Many users are not very aware of using the various tools available to us in terms of checking our account activity.
Ultimately we seek 3 things here- upvotes, comments and views on our posts and frankly the number of followers you have at this point doesn't mean much. You could have accounts voting your content without ever hitting the follow button!
You will see me upvoting and commenting throughout the day as I check and curate content. This has given me a great boost in terms of increasing my follower base. Because for a few months until May when I wasnt writing but only curating content, I had 600 followers and I was following 3000 excellent accounts for everyday curation and it was largely constant. Now I adopt a different strategy for finding content for upvoting.
Couple of months ago I had two trending posts in a row and I gained ~600 followers overnight in addition to regular posts on trending. Which bumped up my number closer to 5-6K range and I wasnt following many users at that point.
So recently I decided to test this out and I followed a large number of accounts to see if this: increases my numbers, results in greater number of uopvotes, views, comments etc and this little experiment has revealed there are issues in the system with respect to engagement. I've informed HQ on what I think are the issues and they are working on improving engagement. But this activity doesnt frankly add the majority of followers to my account. I get a boost with every post I write that goes trending.
Then there is the issue around dead followers and ghost followers for sure. @sjennon's app is certainly useful in figuring these out.
I have seen your work @firepower you work so hard in promoting and making sure the growths of minnows your "ceiling fan" should be worth more than 100$ and thanks for explaining that 80k people you have been following......and did you read @sjenon comment it should be "engage for a engage" not follow for follow
why the hell people dont use those handy things thats available to them (lazziness might be the answer" my last post was about "encouraging people to read markdown guide" the very basic thing that everyone should use in there blogs.. by the way what say ?i make a post out of your fan and give it a run if it really goes out for 100$ or not :Dand also there should be a feature that tells you how many people and which ones have resteemed your post ! you can never know it unless the person does not types in . "RESTEEMED" !!
Currently you can check these details at steemdb.com. Put your username and explore the data. All these things will be fixed moving forward and the notification system will improve as well.
Sub-communities feature which when launched will improve the engagement with the posts as will having a few million users on this platform. But ofcourse everyone will have more people to compete with for sure.
Oh, feel free to make a post out of the fan! hahaha!
Both your posts, this and the markdown one were good btw! I really like the way you make your post headings. very creative!
Btw, check out https://steemit.chat/ sometime. There are two channels for Indian users 1 for general chat and a second one for postpromo. Holla if you get there. Cheers! :)
Also, were working on getting this implemented on Spectacles ;)