If you've been here for long enough, you probably know about The Beast laying in the corner, creeping on our users. What Beast? User retention, or to be more precise, the lack of it. Let's not fool ourselves by looking at Steemit through pink colored glasses, thinking how everything is perfect. It's not, and to be perfectly honest, it's far from it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not pesimistic, nor do I think that Steem/Steemit won't succeed in the future. I'm just being realistic, and I'm telling you how things really are. That's what I've been doing for the past year, ever since I got here, and that's what I'll continue doing in the future. I'm not here to smudge your eyes with lies and nonsense, or to tell you how everything is perfect while it isn't.

So let's comfront the user retention problem by seeing how many of our followers are real. There is this wonderful site called SteemSpectacles made by @pilcrow and @sjennon which allows you to take a realistic look insight into your follower count.

When you first land on the page it will ask you to enter a username which you want to look into. Type in your Steemit nick, or a nick from another user who you would like to a check up for.

Depending on the number of followers you currently have, it could take up to a min or two for it to fully load up. When it does, click on the Followers tab at the left part of the screen.

Here, you will be propted with a stats and names of your GHOST followers (those that are active and haven't interacted with you in 100 posts) and DEAD followers (those that been active for longer than a mont)

The bitter reality

Looking at my stats, we can see the depressing aftermath of The Beast feasting on my fellow Steemians. Most of my followers (4168/4583) are GHOSTS and 1933 out of the 4168 ghosts are DEAD.

How many real followers do you have?

Share your results in the comment section down below!

While some might argue that the GHOSTS are actually somewhat real followers, but they are just shy to interact, this at least gives you an insight to what your real follower base is (those that actually interact with you). Some of your GHOST followers might still read your stuff, but they never engage. Leaving a question hanging in the air:"Who is really a ghost then?" Well, untill we get a way of finding out which users actually read through your posts, we will never know. Until then we can just hope to see more of our GHOST or DEAD followers come to life and start engaging with our content!

How?

START WRIGING MORE INTERESTING/ENGAGING STUFF. Go through the list of your GHOSTS and engage with their content. Ask questions throughout your posts and demand engagement that way, or go around the STEEM blockchain and consume other people's content, engage with them and start building your network. Post by post, comment by comment, the GHOSTS will appear and start engaging with your content. Believe me, they will!

What do you think?

What else can we do to bring up to life our GHOSTS and get more engagement on our posts? See what I did there? Not only is this question going to help me and others reading this blog figure out more ways to get better engagement, but it will also motivate some of you to comment, even though you probably wouldn't have done that if I didn't ask the question.