Many brands desire to boast with many followers on their social media profiles, especially on Instagram, thinking an impressive number will somehow make them more visible or interesting, or bring them more profit. This has led many to buy fake followers, which nowadays isn’t difficult at all – with endless options for buying them, such as agencies that can do it for you, or software.
Nevertheless, despite what some may think, social media isn’t simply a numbers game. Choosing to pay for Instagram followers instead of taking the time to develop a strategy that will help you reach real people and grow your community organically – is a big mistake. As a matter of fact, the whole concept of fake followers defeats the purpose of social media, especially if your goal is to reach new customers or clients.
You Won’t Get Engagement
Instagram and other social media platforms have been invaluable to marketing in recent years. They offer ads, and they offer a lot of targeting options, so you can choose who will see what you post, based on age, gender, profession, and online behavior.
Fake followers are rarely real people, which makes it impossible for them to communicate with you – sharing, commenting, and reacting to your posts in a meaningful way. And when we say meaningful, we are referring to communication that will lead to real connection, which should eventually increase your profits.
Of course, bots or fake profiles can produce some kind of basic automatic interactions but this is often obvious, and, most importantly, meaningless. After all, the whole point of being present on social media for businesses is to increase their visibility and reach more people, to ultimately increase their ROI. The only way to get this is through real engagement. And to get that, you need a good social media strategy, one that will focus on attracting real people, with real profiles.
You Can Lose Your Account
There is something called an engagement rate for social media and as the name suggests it measures how much interaction you get depending on the number of your followers. There is an average and anything that exceeds it by a high margin may be identified as suspicious. This means that by buying fake Instagram followers you may be breaking the policies of the network.
In an effort to improve the experience of users as well as protect them, social media platforms have developed ways to recognize fake accounts and once an account that is considered to be fake is identified, it is eliminated. So, buying followers and using bots is illegal and a direct violation of the terms and conditions of the platform. And since this practice isn’t accepted, it comes with its consequences. After warning you about possible dishonest actions, in the end, they may suspend your accounts.
For anyone trying to reach customers through social media, losing an account can not only be discouraging, but it may even negatively influence your business. It means that any communication you might have had with customers will be gone, and you will have to start everything from scratch.
Your Account Will Look Suspicious
Even though the technology is getting more and more advanced, and machine learning is doing incredibly well at imitating human interaction, keep in mind that your real followers can still mostly recognize automated responses. If you decide to pay for Instagram followers, and especially if you use bots, your posts may end up getting a lot of generic comments, comments in other languages, and so on.
While the possibility of the platform recognizing these actions as a violation and banning you is serious and scary, a much worse thing that can happen is your real followers recognizing that you are using fake followers. Amongst the many reasons why you shouldn’t buy followers and use bots, this one is probably the biggest.
As a business owner, you want a good reputation, and from the beginning, you will try to keep it intact. Social media is the perfect place to show who you are and why you are worthy of your customers’ trust. So, doing something dishonest like this can be seen as a sign that your company isn’t trustworthy, after all.
In a Nutshell
It can be really tempting to buy Instagram followers, especially if you are just starting your business. But the only thing that you can get by the instant boost of your number, is a big illusion of Instagram popularity, which will ultimately turn out to be useless. This fake community isn’t likely to bring you many real followers or more potential clients. On the contrary, this shortcut may even cost your business dearly. You can not only lose your account but you may lose the hard-earned respect of your customers.
