Do you remember when the post promotion was announced, it wasn't that long ago actually. Back then I was concerned that the feature will not be really useful and it seems that my concerns have become a reality. The Promoted page has initially turned into a battlefield on who will pay the most to have his post on top, then it was overtaken mostly by authors that already had high reputation and serious follower base and now... now it seems to be slowly dying. With less posts getting promoted and with less paid to promote them with the reason behind that simply being that there is really no point due to the lack of effect. The only thing that remains useful and actually working is the fact that the Steem Dollars spent for promotion get burned.
I have been testing a couple of times the feature by promoting a few of my posts to see the actual effect. Sure, maybe I don't have a post worth going trending (don't I really), but that does not mean that I don't have good posts right? My success so far was in getting a bit of boost of the post reward from a few votes mostly from Whales after promoting a post. This was totally missing the point of authors getting new readers by promoting their posts, but was exactly what was happening. Pretty much nobody besides some Whales and the users that did promote their posts was visiting that page and the second group was not paying much attention as it was not there to vote for "the competition".
Yesterday I have decided to give another chance of the Promoted page by promoting a post that needed to get more attention and raise some awareness. The post in question was this one: Bug Report: Issues on Steemit and Different Steem Tools with IE11 where I talk about some of the issues that Steemit currently has under Internet Explorer 11 as well as cover over 10 different Steem Tools that aslo don't properly work under IE11. My posts reporting bugs have been a total failure so far, a failure in terms of getting attention or at least that was the impression I was getting.
This time I wanted to make the post more visible and get more attention and I have decided to Promote it, so I did and I did use enough SBD to make sure it stays among the top 20 promoted posts. Now, 24 hours later nothing much has changed with that post, and I've been looking at other highly ranked posts on the Promoted page and there is not much happening with them either. Seems that even the Whales are not visiting that page anymore...
So i just wanted to let you know that I will not be using the Promote feature anymore, and so should you as it apparently has turned into a pointless and useless way to waste your hard earned Steem Dollars without any effect. And I'm not talking about getting rewards here... I'm talking about getting more people to read your posts and maybe even react to them, not to mention to actually gain some new followers. There are different ways that can be more effective and completely free such as using the Steemit Chat for example, not spamming with links to your posts.
Promoting a post on the Promoted page has literally become burning SBD and nothing more...
If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.
Did you like what you have just read? Check my other posts on steemit @cryptos