Like the majority of businesses, one of your objectives from social media to grow your online presence and with that comes the expectation of growing your audience size. Everyone wants more followers, right? As a marketing agency with years of expertise working with social media platforms, we understand that growing your social media presence isn’t something that is going to happen overnight; it takes time and effort. As a result of this, it can become very tempting for businesses to consider ‘buying followers’ on their social media platforms in order to speed up this process.
But what harm does this cause to your brand?
In this blog, we cover the 5 main reasons why you shouldn’t buy your followers on your social media accounts:
This Isn’t Your Real Audience
When you’re purchasing followers on social media, do you really know who you’re purchasing? These followers are not your customers, or potential customers, in fact, are they even real people? They will not be the customer who is going to spend money with you by purchasing your products and/or services or the user who wants to follow your page because they’re genuinely interested in your offering and brand. The ultimate goal of your online social media presence is not to have the largest following but to connect and engage with your customers regularly. Are these the users you want to be wasting your marketing efforts on?
Engagement Levels Will Decrease
By purchasing followers and adding them to your social media accounts will have a harmful effect on your engagement levels. You will begin to see that these levels will decrease over time and on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram; this will work against you. Having a low engagement rate on these platforms in particular triggers their algorithms which identify the fact that your audience are not interested in your posts and the content you’re sharing. This increases the likelihood of your content posts not appearing organically in the news feeds on these platforms. Is that really what you want? Reducing your overall reach to genuine customers?
SPAM
Once you begin incorporating fake followers into your social media community, you begin to lose control of your accounts and lose sight of who is genuine and who isn’t. It also opens the doorways to the fake followers targeting your genuine customers with their own SPAM. If your brand becomes recognisable and known for spamming followers with irrelevant content or SPAM, you will begin to lose your real followers and your audience size will decrease.
You’re Going Against The T&C’s
With every social media platform, there are specific Terms and Conditions in play to ensure that the experience received by not only the end user but businesses alike, is that of a good one to ensure people continue to use the networks. Buying followers is against the T&C’s of most social media networks. As a result of this, they will not think twice before removing fake followers or potentially, banning your social media accounts that use these services in order to purchase fake followers. The algorithms that are in place, continuously monitor this type of activity to ensure users and businesses abide by their policies.
Your Reputation
Your reputation is everything! To become a great brand, honesty and transparency are key. Being discovered for buying followers can harm your reputation and be embarrassing for your brand. This can result in losing faith and trust from your real customers and could potentially harm your relationships with your existing audience.
To conclude, we can see the negative effects buying followers has not only on your social media accounts but your brand as a whole. Social media marketing is a long-term process which takes effort to build and grow overtime so don’t put this at risk by purchasing followers. We covered in our previous blog the benefits of having a strong social media strategy in place and how to create your strategy, which includes growing your followers the true way whether this is organically or through paid advertising. There are other routes you can use to achieve this success.
Need our help with your social media marketing? Get in touch with our specialist team to learn more.
