Building a social media presence is one of the best ways to grow your brand or a business hoping to expand its reach. Social media is a powerful tool that connects you with people worldwide, enabling you to engage with audiences that may have previously been out of your reach.
All social media platforms are more valuable to you if you have a large following. However, having a large following is only part of the equation because those followers must be real people. Thousands of websites offer to boost your follower count for a relatively small payment. While this shortcut seems tempting, buying followers can do you more harm than good. You are about to learn seven reasons why you should never pay to boost your social media follower count.
1. Bought Followers Aren’t Real
When you buy social media followers, most of them are not real people. This fact is something to be aware of, but something not many people know. Many of these so-called followers are inactive accounts or bots that add no value to your online presence. If you wish to discuss your latest blog article or have an established business like the BetOnline sportsbook and you buy followers, be aware that these accounts will not like your content, engage with your posts, or comment on your updates.
Real followers are people who have found value in your content and who want to engage with you. It is far better to have 100 genuine people than 10,000 inactive or bot followers. A large, unengaging following is akin to having a fancy car that doesn’t have an engine. Sure, it looks impressive, but it’s pointless in the grand scheme of things.
2. Low Engagement Will Hurt Your Credibility
Social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and X use complex algorithms to determine which posts get seen by more people. The algorithms look favorably on accounts with high engagement rates, including likes, comments, and shares. For reasons we’ve just discussed, buying followers will see your engagement rate plummet because fake followers don’t engage with your content.
Additionally, having 5,000 followers but only 25 people consistently liking and commenting on your posts is a significant mismatch that will raise red flags with the algorithms and anyone visiting your account. Such discrepancies will damage your credibility and make fewer people follow or trust you.
3. It Can Lead to Account Suspensions
Social media platforms are becoming more vigilant about detecting and removing fake accounts. Most of us have never read a social media platform’s terms of service, but buying followers violates those terms and could result in your account being suspended or permanently banned.
Shadowbanning is another defense social media platforms use against fake followers. Rather than suspending or fully banning your account, they shadowban you, which makes it look like your account is untouched by them. However, you will not appear in hashtags, feeds, or explore pages, significantly reducing your organic reach.
4. Fake Followers Never Convert Into Customers
Whether they post funny memes, make outrageous comments, or tease their rivals, the ultimate goal of a business’s social media campaign is to convert their followers into paying customers. Only real people can purchase a product, book your services, or advocate your brand. Bought followers will never do this because bots run them or they are inactive accounts.
It is essential that your followers are interested in what you’re selling. Therefore, it is important to have quality rather than quantity regarding followers. Every real follower is a potential customer; fake followers are simply empty numbers on a website.
5. You’ll Miss Out on Valuable Insights
Discovering what works and resonates with your social media followers is often a case of trial and error. Social media managers use in-built or third-party tools to analyze the accounts’ analytics. They look at many factors, including engagement rates of various post types and when their audience is most active. Fake followers will skew these numbers and make them unreliable.
Buying fake followers makes knowing what content your real audience likes more challenging, if not impossible. Your engagement metrics will be off, leaving you essentially flying blind and unable to optimize your content for growth and maximum effect.
6. It Can Damage Your Brand’s Reputation
Your reputation is everything on social media, so any scandals can seriously damage it, regardless of how small they seem. Imagine you’re a business looking to build customer trust or someone who dreams of becoming an influencer. Now, imagine the fallout if it became known you bought social media followers. How could anyone trust you again? Your authenticity and reputation would be in tatters.
7. It Is a Waste of Money
You should realize that you should never purchase social media followers. Above all, it is a waste of money. Even if a website offers services for a couple of dollars, what are you getting for your money? You may as well set fire to those dollar bills based on what you have read today! Buying followers has no upsides but plenty of negatives associated with the practice.
People would be much better off investing any money earmarked for purchasing fake followers into collaborations with influencers, funding targeted advertisements, or paying an expert to produce high-quality content. At least this way, you will receive something tangible for your “investment,” not just some numbers on a screen.
In Conclusion
Buying followers is a short-term solution to a long-term goal. It is easy to see why individuals and businesses want to take a shortcut to a large follower count, but doing so provides nothing but a temporary ego boost and, potentially, a myriad of issues and problems.
Social media is about building and nurturing a community, fostering genuine relationships, and providing value to your followers through high-quality content. Seeing your follower count grow slowly when you pour your heart and soul into a project can be demoralizing, but success in social media takes time.
Remember, quality over quantity is the key. Eventually, you will have a large follower base that is more valuable to you, your brand, and your bottom line than any amount of bought followers could ever provide.
