Scan through websites like Fiverr, and you’ll find hundreds of people selling volumes of followers at the flick of a button. If you think these proposals sound too good to be true, then you’ve hit the nail on the head. No matter how tempting it can be to cheat and buy yourself an ‘audience’, there are a handful of proven reasons why purchasing followers is never a good idea.
The best way to grow your following is by offering killer content that your target users love. In this article, we’re going to explain why you should never resort to buying followers on social media. No matter how hard it gets to compete, unethically boosting your number count is never going to work. Here’s why:
Adding uninterested followers will dilute your audience
Don’t you hate it when you order a drink at the bar, and you can tell from one sip that it’s been watered down? Buying followers can have the same impact on your engagement. When you buy followers, you have no idea if they’re going to be real people behind the accounts with any interest in your content. Let’s say your prime target is middle-aged men in the UK – adding 500 followers that mainly consists of foreign teenagers isn’t exactly going to translate into increased business.
When you grow an organic audience, it’s valuable for two main reasons:
🌍 You can focus on targeting a specific demographic
🙌🏼 You’re confident that each and every active user in your organic audience is following you because they have a real interest in what you’re doing and the things you have to say
Engagement is a huge factor on social media. With Facebook, for example, a drop in engagement means your posts are less likely to appear in the newsfeeds of your followers. Social media is only valuable if your followers engage with your work. When you buy random followers, you’re effectively weakening your audience by filling it with accounts that are bound to ignore what you have to say. You can also use Facebook SMM panel for more efficient and streamlined social media management.
Spammers love exploiting brands that buy followers
Ever noticed how the people selling followers are doing so for outrageously cheap prices? If it’s such a powerful way to get the job done, shouldn’t they be charging way more? Ask yourself these questions and you’ll start to understand what’s really going on. These people are selling a very powerful strategy, but it’s not designed to help you, it’s designed to take advantage of you.
As soon as you buy a volume of new followers, you’re effectively allowing a large stream of new accounts to access your community. The owners of these accounts will then be able to spam their own agenda to your real followers. Whether they want to try and make quick gains by bombarding your organic audience with a particular message or use this leverage as a means to damage your brand, either way, the results are devastating for you.
Real people hate spam with a passion. As soon as your genuine followers relate your brand to these repulsive spam tactics, they’ll run for this hills. You might think you’re buying a boat-load of new customers, but what you could actually be buying is a plague that threatens to tear all of your hard-earned progress to shreds.
Your reputation is put at major risk
On top of the technical disadvantages of paid followers, you don’t need a whole lot of imagination to envision the consequences of actually being caught buying followers. If anyone catches wind of what you’re doing, it’ll scream to people that your brand is struggling to build appeal naturally and needs to pay people to like it.
Today, the challenges of reputation management are greater than they’ve ever been before. In a world where everyone is sharing every thought they’ve ever had via their smartphones, there’s no telling the level of damage that could be caused to your brand if someone discovered that large chunks of your followers are fake. One of the best ways to avoid receiving negative attention is to be as transparent as possible. It’s impossible to be utterly transparent when you’re doing something as embarrassing as purchasing a higher follower count.
False followers aren’t exactly hard to spot. Everyone knows what to look for.
Buying followers actually breaks the rules
Practically every major social media network out there has terms and conditions that prohibit the buying of followers. They have such strong policies against the act because fake followers actually have a detrimental impact on the usability of a social platform. The world’s largest social media platforms make their money by selling the power of their sites as a marketing tool. When you buy followers, you undermine the platforms true worth which in turn has an impact on its market value.
If a social media network becomes known for harbouring too many spam accounts and allowing too much false engagement, it’ll lose value very quickly. The consequences of buying followers can lead to a complete shutdown of your account without any chance of appeal. You don’t own your social media pages, the platforms do, so you better play by their rules.
Those are the most vital reasons you should stay away from buying batches of followers. If you’re keen to grow your audience, the best way to do so is to knuckle down and get on with creating magnificent content. It can be time-consuming, but the fact that it’s such a challenge makes it all the more valuable when you get it right!
