I don’t think it translates to now, but the strategy I used with great success on Vine, Instagram, musically (pre TikTok) and Google+ — I have a feeling it won’t work anymore though: I followed the foaf model: friend-of-a-friend. I was big into the “semantic web” and foaf stuff at that time (2010 when Web 2.0 was starting to take hold). So I would look at the friends of someone I was friends with and follow a couple. Then I would following a couple of their followers. Just two levels away. It’s part of the “Network Neighborhood” model of foaf math. I followed that consistently and would get about a 4:1 follow/following ratio, which was pretty good. I’d occasionally prune my followings that weren’t following back or engaging in other ways but not obsessively. The more popular I got, the people would be impressed I was following, not even knowing who I was. Oh, and the big key was that I would follow new people with only a few followers but who had signs of being engaged on the platform.
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