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In the digital age maintaining a solid social media presence is an important factor for any business, with one of the main things marketers focus on being gaining a large social media following.
Growing your follower count can be a time-consuming task, often taking months, if not years to fully grow your followers to a significant number. With so much effort required to encourage authentic follows, it can be tempting for businesses to resort to buying followers in order to appear more popular. But is there any justification for buying followers and can it really help your business?
Why Buy Followers?
For years brands, celebrities, bloggers and influencers have been buying followers, hoping to deceive people into believing they are much more popular than they actually are. Follower numbers are a common metric used by brands to determine how well their accounts are performing, which is why many choose to buy followers for a quick way to encourage people to check out their platforms.
Why You Shouldn’t Buy Social Media Followers
Buying followers might sound great but there’s a good reason it’s so frowned upon by other brands and professionals, let’s take a look at some of the biggest reasons why purchasing followers can damage your brand.
Very Little Engagement
Having a high follower count looks good, however, if a brand has 10k followers and yet has very little engagement in terms of likes, comments or shares, it instantly looks suspicious. Logically it makes more sense to appeal to fewer people, but people who really care about your content, over a large audience of bots who don’t care.
If you’re wanting to measure the success of your social media more effectively then you need to start looking at engagement metrics over your follower count alone.
No Real Audience
Bought followers aren’t your customers, they don’t care about what you’re selling and they don’t want to know about your services, bought followers are just numbers, meaning you get no insight into how your customers are thinking and feeling. You should aim to generate followers who are your real customers, ones who are likely to pay an interest in your brand and who you can build more of a relationship with.
Can Ruin Your Reputation
Buying followers can be a huge way to damage your brand reputation, nothing makes a brand look shadier than genuine customers discovering your ‘fans’ are all fake. Your brand should be built up on trust, from your services through to your social media, don’t deceive your audience, be transparent with them from the beginning and only show off the followers you’ve gained organically.
Growing your online community takes time and effort, however, it can be worthwhile when done correctly. Remember social media is a marathon and not a sprint, so you shouldn’t need to rush to generate new followers in order to get ahead. Take the time to get to know your audience and find a strategy that works for you and your brand, rather than raising your popularity through poor practices.
