Buying Social Media Followers – Is it Worth It, What are the risks?

🤔 Building a large social media following is definitely not an easy task. This is the main reason why lots of brands, businesses and even individuals decide to go down the “easier” route – buying social media followers. 

Exciting, right? But is buying social media followers a good practice? Most importantly is it worth it and should you do it? 

👉 We understand that having lots of followers on your social media profiles, specifically Instagram and Facebook can be really important for the overall credibility and brand trust. Furthermore, it may be assumed that the more followers you have, the more sales you have made and therefore will make in future. 

This “sounds legit”, right? Let’s go buy those social media followers and start increasing sales and revenue right away. Please spare us a few more minutes before you go shopping for those sacred fake followers. 

As tempting as the concept of buying social media followers may be, there are a few factors you will need to consider before you go down this road.  

First and foremost – ❗ Buying Social Media Followers Doesn’t Make You More Sales. ❗

In fact, doing this does not benefit your business at all because it will not get people to start being interested in your brand. Most of the time the followers you buy are actually bots that don’t ever like your photos, click through to the website or interact with your page/ profile. You may tell yourself, yes, they won’t but actual people will see that I have lots of followers and will start following my business and spend money on my products and/or service. This is also not quite correct and this leads us to our next point: 

🚩 Fake followers do not bring engagement. Imagine this scenario: you land on an Instagram profile of a clothing brand. They have quite a large following let’s say 15k-25k. You go on their profile and open up a random image of their product to see 5 likes, no comments .. no engagement. Would you trust the brand or would you exit their profile and keep your browsing journey? We believe it will be the latter. Furthermore, because the bots you are considering buying will not interact with your posts, the algorithm of both Facebook and Instagram will detect that your content has a really low engagement rate and followers are not interested in your posts. This means that that you will have an extremely slim chance to get your future posts appearing organically in your genuine followers’ news feeds.

Another point against buying fake social media followers is that it will look bad on your brand in the long run. Being known for trying to look more popular than you are will not land well with any potential partners you are planning to collaborate with. Nobody wants this and we are sure you don’t either.

The best way to gain real, committed followers is to produce good quality, relatable content on a regular basis. Being honest and staying true to yourself as a brand or creator will inevitably pay off. Doing this is the better strategy in the long rung. It may be more time consuming but it is worth it. The best part is that you won’t have to pay a cent to a somewhat dodgy company to provide you with a fake following. Think about your Return on Investment. 

🚩 Still not convinced that the “easy” way may prove to be really hard? What if we told you that if Instagram or Facebook’s algorithm detects an issue and it’s really common for them to do so, they may disable your accounts which is definitely not a great outcome. Furthermore, you can easily lose your whole profile. 🚩

❗ Buying fake followers and likes or comments is a violation of all Social Media platforms’ Terms Of Service. There are numerous cases where Facebook and Instagram have deleted accounts with fake followers instantly and without a warning. The worst part is not just the wasted money and time spent to build the page or profile up. Okay, what is it then? –  The fact that both Facebook and Instagram can completely ban a business for this policy violation!

😱 Imagine being banned from two of the most powerful marketing channels … not great at all, right? 

Bottom line is that it is really easy to spot when a profile or page on social media has bought its followers. This looks extremely bad on the brand and it can be very detrimental if the worst-case scenario plays off. 

If however, you decide to go down the “fake” route, beware of all the phishing scams out there. Many fake Instagram follower suppliers will just take your money and vanish which is the best case actually. There are known cases of such companies stealing your business profile and even going as far as identity theft. 

We know the social media pressure is huge, but you should not focus on the number of followers you have. Instead, pay close attention to producing great content and interacting with people regularly. This way your follower growth will happen organically.

It’s much more important to focus on your actual engagement rate. Pay attention to the overall traffic, leads and sales you are receiving via your social media channels.

👉 If you need help with managing your social media profiles simply speak to us and see how we can help you and your team. If you are still feeling a bit shy – follow us to stay up to date with all things social.