RichThesaurus
follow in someone's footsteps
vs
tread in someone's footsteps
follow in someone's footsteps
verb
To follow the same path as someone; to take actions similar to another's.
tread in someone's footsteps
How often have the words
follow in someone's footsteps
and
tread in someone's footsteps
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)