What is The Relationship Between Followers and Hub Score?

I'd like to dedicate this hub to N.E. Wright who was asked the question that I'm responding to with this hub.

N.E. Wright was one of the first hubbers to welcome me to HubPages.  It didn't take too long to realize that she follows everyone.  I have two other accounts that she's also followed, and I began to recognize her picture on a lot of profile pages.

In spite of that.  I have to say it's nice to have someone tell you they like your writing and follow you after you post your first hub!

And I made a return visit and read a few of her hubs as well.  She writes a good hub, but not a lot of them.  All of her hubs have good hub scores.  I can't see any reason, quality wise, that her personal hub score isn't higher.

So how can you get so many followers (not to mention write such good hubs) and still have a low hub score?

A few years ago, when I was first discovering social media on sites like mySpace and Twitter there was this concept of having followers. When you first sign up for these sites they ask you to send an email to all your friends and family and ask them to follow you. Most of my friends and family were still asking why they should use email when they had a perfectly good mailbox right in front of their house.

As you can guess, I didn't get a lot of followers from this email blast.

But it seemed important to get followers. I want to have friends. I want to be popular. (I think that's some leftover PSTD from being in high school and NOT being the most popular girl there.)

So, when some stranger came by and left a nice comment like, "your blog is really cool." or "I agree with that last Tweet." and they followed me or friended me... well of course I friended them back. I even started searching for other people to follow and friend myself.

I wasn't that good at it. Maybe I'm more over high school than I thought. It got boring after a while and I realized that you can't really pay attention to the people you want to follow if you are getting everyone else's feed.

But I was there long enough to recognize the numbe one way to get LOTS of followers is to just follow them. Not everyone will follow you back. It's a numbers game.

It's also considered spam to people who don't play the game. And increasingly, it's considered spam by ranking programs. It's like when Google detects too many backlinks, or worse backlinks from bad neighborhoods.

The HubPages help says (about followers):

You should only follow people who you have a genuine interest in keeping up with.By following a Hubber you are saying that their activity on HubPages is noteworthy or interesting to you. Following excessively or indiscriminately may result in a low Hubber score.

I belive the reason N.E. Wright has a low personal hubscore is that she follows too many people.  And that is probably also how she got so many followers. 

The other way to get followers is to write good hubs. I don't have very many followers. It seems like I get about one new follower per hub I post. (As I mentioned before I have 3 accounts and this general rule of thumb holds true for all of them.)

So if you want more followers, write more hubs. Make sure the hubs are something that people will be interested in and enjoy reading. Then they will be more likely to want to be notified of your next hub.

Writing good hubs also has an impact on your hubscore. Writing a lot of hubs not as much.

As CDL Career Coach, I'm taking the HubChallenge this month. That means less time to write on either of my other two accounts. I have about 3 times as many hubs with this account as the other two, buy my hubscore is the same (within a point or two) on all three accounts. I keep the other two for writing on OTHER subjects. One of them is very technical and the other is very opinionated. None of that seems to matter. While I personally feel that the quality of my hubs differs between these pen names I've got set up, the hub scores on my hubs are fairly consistent overall. So with about the same average hubscore on hubs, I've gotten about the same personal hubscore on all three accounts.

Community participation does not seem to be a very significant factor either. I let all my "alters" participate from time to time, but one barely reads or comments at all, and I don't think has answered any questions or commented on any forums yet. Still, this morning I woke up to discover that my most hermit-like personality was up in the 90's while the other two of us were still in the high 80's!! And she has the least number of hubs too...grrr... I'm jealous of myself!

The point is, the only way to get a really good hubber score is to write high quality hubs.

Write on topics that will interest others. Write longer hubs. 300 words is a minimum, Hubbers with really high scores seem to write longer hubs... 1000-1500 words or even more. I was just reading a hub by WordPlay that was 7000 words long (How to Make Money Writing for Hub Pages). Now, here is a hubber with a 100 personal score writing really great BOOKS full of useful information for other hubbers to learn from. I'm not jealous of WordPlay, she obviously earned what she got.

I am a little sorry for N.E. Wright though. Her hubs are entertaining to read and she seems like a really nice person. I imagine that she was a little like me in high school... just wanting to be popular and not really sure how to do it. I'm sure that her personal hubscore would go up if she would unfollow a few hubbers. I've seen her following hubbers who were obviously writing nothing but spam. That probably hurts her more than the number of people she follows.

So be careful who you hang out with. Try to follow people you admire. Don't just read them, but try to learn from what they do that's working in their hubs. Are they writing longer hubs? Are they writing more advice and how-to than religion and politics? Are they using photos and videos to illustrate their hubs. Try to do the same.