Is Buying Followers a Good Way to Boost Your Brand?
When you’re just starting to build your brand online, you may be tempted to buy likes and followers to grow your social channels. Giving them a little boost to start can’t be that bad, right? Many other brands and online personalities do it, and some marketing experts even recommend the practice.
There’s no question that a large following on social media can be very valuable. Its main benefit is social proof — users who are unfamiliar with your brand will likely perceive it as more established and trustworthy if they see that it has a large following. Brands that are impressed with your numbers and are looking for more exposure might reach out for sponsorships.
Also, with the algorithm changes in Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms over the years, organic reach has decreased across the board. As a result, growing an organic following has become increasingly difficult. The saturation of social media with brands and influencers all competing for more followers and engagement isn’t helping, either.
Growing followers requires hard, consistent work. You need to create original, stand-out content; post often; use features like Stories, Reels and live video; be up-to-date on the hashtags you should use, and constantly engage with other accounts. Unless you hit the jackpot with one very viral post, growing followers to a large number could take a long time.
So why not just take a shortcut and buy followers instead?
The short answer is, because it WILL harm your brand. But if you want to gain a better understanding of why that is, keep reading.
1. Your account could be penalized or even suspended
After a recent update in its terms of use, Instagram has started identifying and removing fake accounts, as well as likes, comments and follows that are generated by third-party applications. Instagram performs a million sweeps per second to identify and remove fake accounts. Instagram’s community guidelines make it clear that the platforms frown upon likes and followers that are generated artificially:
Instagram penalizes accounts that are proven to be paying for fake followers by locking them out of the account; and if the account does this repeatedly, it could be banned by Instagram permanently.
Twitter’s Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy explicitly prohibits “inauthentic engagements that attempt to make accounts or content more popular or active than they are” and using fake accounts and automation for trying to artificially influence conversations. Accounts that are found to be violating the policy may be temporarily locked or permanently suspended.
These are just two examples, but all social platforms have similar policies.
2. Your money could go to waste if the platform deletes the followers you bought
Social platform have been cracking down on fake accounts, so if the service you procured your followers from uses fake accounts, you might be wasting good money. Facebook, for example, uses machine learning to catch suspicious activity like fake likes, and will remove those likes and block accounts engaging in such activity. In fact, Facebook has a team dedicated to fighting suspicious activity:
LinkedIn, a platform that is all about reputation and real professional connections, takes the issue of fake accounts extremely seriously. Between January and June 2019 alone, LinkedIn blocked 19.5 fake accounts from being created at registration and restricted 2 million existing fake accounts using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.
3. Your performance metrics will become unreliable
One of the main reasons that brands want to grow their following is to get more engagement on their posts. The higher the number of engaged users, the higher the odds some of them will take a desired action — a sign up, a purchase, etc. But fake followers will not boost your engagement, as it’s highly unlikely that they will engage with your posts.
Even if you have some real followers, the bots and the inactive account will distort your metrics when you try to understand your engagement rates, click through rates, and conversion rates. And when you can’t rely on your metrics, you can’t optimize your campaigns. You will not be able to put any marketing strategy in place and you will essentially be setting up your brand to fail.
4. Fake followers will not get you more sales
While the large following will look good when people check out your account, you will not get any real results from your purchased followers. They will not generate any results on their own. They might make someone look twice at your account and momentarily make them think you are a bigger brand than you actually are.
But anyone who is a little social media savvy (most Millennials and Gen Zs, and a large number of Gen Xers — and your audience likely falls within these parameters) — would notice the incongruence between the large following and the low engagement and guess something is fishy. And brands you might be hoping to create partnerships with will notice that right away. So it’s not very likely that your manufactured following will generate a growth in your real following, and without real followers, who will purchase from your brand?
5. Potential sponsors will blacklist you
If you’re hoping to make big bucks from brand sponsorships, buying followers is a big no-no. Brands that are looking for accounts to partner with have ways to check if your following is authentic or not, for example:
- Your engagement rates do not match up with your number of followers
- Follower-buying services are following your account
- Your followers are showing little to no activity on their own accounts (no posts, few followers, no profile photo, etc.)
Many brands will blacklist you If they suspect you are buying followers. Brands looking for influencers to partner with place a high value on credibility, since they want their product or service to reach real people who might actually be interested in it. Manufactured followers don’t have any real value for them — brands are usually looking for accounts that have built their following organically.
6. Your real followers might not see you on their feeds
Another hazard of buying followers is not letting the algorithm work its magic. Social platforms’ algorithms rely heavily on engagement. If you have no real engagement, Instagram will not put your posts on your real followers’ feeds — and will also not to put it in the Explore feed, where potential followers can discover you.
Out of sight, out of mind: if your real followers don’t see your posts, they might forget that you exist. If people who might be genuinely interested in your brand can’t see your posts on their through the Explore feed or their social circles, you are missing your chance at growing an authentic following.
— — — — —
How do you grow your following then? Good, original content; eye-catching images and videos; consistently posting and engaging with other accounts; providing real value to followers; utilizing the latest features; connecting with ongoing trends; and using the platforms where your audience is — that’s the way to go. Yes, it takes longer, and it’s hard work — but there is no other way to get a real, relevant following.
Adding paid social campaigns to your organic efforts can also help in growing your followers — provided those campaigns are strategically planned and target the right audience. Interested in hearing more about how social media campaigns can help your brand? Chat with us! We’re happy to help you on your social media journey.
ONBOARDdigital is a performance-based digital marketing agency located in the heart of Toronto, Canada. A team of passionate digital strategists, campaign managers, and creative professionals, we strive to inspire our clients and help them succeed. #getONBOARD.
We are happy to collaborate with your team to customize a solution that’s right for you.
