Why Buying Followers Is A Bad Idea
Should I Buy Followers?
If you manage social media accounts you've undoubtedly heard of or been told to buy followers. Initially it looks like a good idea, right? You have a Twitter or Instagram account with 200 followers and feel like 20,000 followers would look a lot better and lend you more credibility, but you couldn't be further from the truth.
In reality, when you buy followers, you're buying a whole lot of nothing and you also risk being punished for it in the long run. Bought followers are almost always empty accounts with no activity or interactions, so you'll never get a retweet out of it. It also looks sketchy when most of your followers have never tweeted and have a first and last name that look like a computer language.
You can get caught and suspended!
Did you know that it is easy to get caught buying followers? Sites like TwitterAudit.com and StatusPeople.com have built algorithms and audits that calculate the percentage of followers are real or fake. Twitter for example, can suspend your account if they find that you have gained a large following using one of these schemes. Unfortunately, there's no way to completely avoid having fake accounts follow you, but you lose all your credibility when the majority of your followers are fake.
The most important thing to remember when trying to gain followers is that interaction is fundamental. The point of getting you and your brand on social media is to interact with people. That means replying to posts, creating content that your followers will retweet, and having people reach out to you, all of which won't happen when you have a herd of fake accounts following you.
It becomes difficult to track your social media performance
Tracking your performance becomes much harder when you have fake followers. For example, Homesync provides you with an array of analytics and reports which allow you to analyze your performance on social media, but when you have fake followers, all these analytics are skewed and will give you a tougher time deciphering what is real and what is not. Trying to improve upon your social media strategy becomes more difficult when you're not sure how many of your followers are real and how many of them are fake.
So a quick recap:
- Risk having your account suspended
- Lose out on interactions with retweets, replies, and mentions
- Easy to get found out
- Makes analytics less valuable
- Give you a false sense of confidence in terms of your content quality
- Waste of your money!