Buying followers and likes to inflate numbers on your social media accounts is not part of a good marketing strategy.
Social media is very useful for marketing. It is an excellent way to connect you with your audience. Genuine engagement and interaction on social networks can have a big impact on brand awareness and sales. There are plenty of tempting offers out there to buy followers and likes. Not only is buying likes and followers not the way to properly use social media for marketing, it can hurt your overall marketing efforts.
Here are the top reasons you should not buy followers & likes:
1. It Breaks The Trust
One of the main reason you use social media is to establish trust with your audience or customers. If you buy followers you are essentially trying to lie about the amount of people that are interested in your company in order to attract others. This starts the relationship off on the wrong foot. When people find out that you bought followers it will erode trust.
2. It Is Against The Rules (and Illegal)
Even though most sources that sell followers claim to be selling high quality accounts, most of the time they are not. The followers come from illegal click farms around the world. You run the risk of getting your account shut down if you get caught and this tactic does you no good. Facebook recently announced they would be ramping up their efforts against the sale of fake accounts, likes and followers. New York State has also started the process of making it a crime to sell followers and many other states may be doing the same.
3. It Contributes To Identity Theft
Many of the accounts for sale are based off the stolen identities of other people. Buying likes contributes to the underground network of identity theft.
4. It Doesn’t Help Your Business
Buying followers doesn’t help you get customers. The accounts are usually bots that don’t have real people behind them so no one is interacting with your content. Don’t expect any engagement from the followers you buy.
5. They Don’t Last
You will see your numbers go up at first but then you will see a decline. This is for many reasons. The social media platforms are constantly sweeping the networks and getting rid of these fake accounts, you can see hundred if not thousands of followers lost at any given time
6. It Messes Up Analytics
If a majority of your followers are fake accounts, how do you accurately measure how your content is doing and how your strategy is doing. The answers is… you don’t. The numbers of real engagement will be thrown off and useless to you. One of the most powerful features of social media marketing is the use of the data you get.
What do fake follower account look like?
You will notice fake accounts have a low follower count and high following count, sometimes they have pictures but often times those are just stolen from other accounts, Many fake accounts have no posts they are simply set up (or stolen) with the purpose of being sold to those looking to buy followers and likes. (Below are examples of fake Instagram accounts that are sold as followers)
There Are Ways To Get Real Followers and Likes.
1. Put Out Content People Want
The simple answer to getting real followers is through good old fashioned hard work and putting out content that people really want to engage with. Numbers are just a metric, you should be looking for real relationship and trust building with your audience.
2. Advertising Platforms
You can reach more people by using the advertising platforms available social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Snapchat. Targeting the right audiences with the right content will get you results.
3. Invite Your Customers
Simply ask your customers to follow you on social media. You can put a sign up in your place of business letting customers know you what platforms you are on. Encourage them to check out your profiles. Don’t forget to make sure you have engaging content that will be of value to them.
4. Consistency
Posting on a regular basis will help grow your following and likes. People will come to expect to see content from you and will engage with your content if it is good.
As you can see there are plenty of downsides when you buy followers and likes. You should put your time and money into creating and distributing actual good content that is entertaining, informative and engaging.