Buying Followers For Social Media: The Pros And Cons. What are the implications on the different sites of boosting your account in this way? Once you have paid for the number of followers you want, the supplying company will just follow your account with the purchased quota of fake accounts. Below is a perfect example of a fake follower account on Instagram. Incoherent and random posts (and only a few of them) – check. The real issue with bought followers So we’ve looked at the pros and cons of artificially inflating your account’s popularity with different types of users, but of course there are much bigger implications. The only significant, long term benefit of doing this, is that your account looks more popular than it is, which may in turn influence the kind of people who regard that as an important signal. In all cases, the number of additional followers you gain (who are maybe really interested in your product or service) will likely be a small number compared to the number of fake accounts you’ve bought. And where it really gets bad is if you’re going to do any paid for marketing, which these days is pretty much crucial to your long term strategy. So you’re stuck with forever paying to show posts to that big set of fake accounts , in order to get to the handful of genuinely interested followers who are mixed in with them.
Buying followers for social media: the Pros and Cons, and what you need to know
Companies selling instant Follower or Liker boosts have been around almost since the dawn of social media itself. In the early days, we assumed that these companies would die out as users got more sophisticated and more able to spot those accounts whose “popularity” was entirely faked. That hasn’t proven to be the case at all; in fact, the industry in fake followers seems to be thriving.
So, can buying followers ever help a business be successful on social media? Are all bought followers the same? What are the implications on the different sites of boosting your account in this way? We know you’re wondering: here are the answers!
What am I buying?
First of all, it’s important to recognise exactly what you’re buying when you purchase followers. In the vast majority of cases, you’re gaming the number that appears in your account bio – your number of Twitter or Instagram Followers, or Facebook Likers. The number itself will be bigger, but that is the limit of the benefit you’re getting. The accounts won’t belong to real consumers in any normal sense.
The basic level – bargain basement followers
The organisations selling these followers, often based around “click farms” in parts of the world where labour is extremely cheap, have hundreds of people setting up fake accounts constantly.
The “quality” of those accounts (ie, the effort they’ve gone to to make the account look like a real user) varies from the “egg avatar with randomly generated name” type through to those which would stand up to some very brief scrutiny – that is, they have an avatar pic, something written in more-or-less coherent English in their biographies, and a handful of generic and usually nonsensical posts.
Once you have paid for the number of followers you want, the supplying company will just follow your account with the purchased quota of fake accounts. You should NOT have to supply your password in order for this to happen!
Here are the pros and cons of this cheap’n’cheerful approach:
Pros:
- These accounts will generally continue to follow you, as they’re not being used by real people;
- They make your account, particularly at a quick glance, look more popular than it actually is.
Cons:
- To anyone who bothers to look, it’s usually totally obvious when an account has purchased these followers.
- Apart from the sudden jump in numbers, the accounts themselves just scream “fake” in terms of their meaningless biographies and nonsense posts.
Below is a perfect example of a fake follower account on Instagram. Implausible name – check. Meaningless biography – check. Incoherent and random posts (and only a few of them) – check. Following a high number of people in order to get a few to follow them back – check, and very low ratio of followers to people being followed- check again.
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