If you have a business, whether online or not, it is very likely that you have profiles on social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And you may also want to have more followers on these channels. After all, the more people who come into contact with your brand, the more recognition, reach and, consequently, sales you will have.
Precisely for this reason, it is very easy to find offers that promise thousands of followers on your social networks to guarantee rapid growth of the public.
Tempting, right?
The problem is that buying followers is not as lucrative a business as it seems. And in this text, you will understand why this practice is not recommended, in addition to seeing some tips that we give you to increase your audience organically and without spending a penny.
Shall we start?
The importance of the audience in social networks
All most used are based on building connections and relationships between people.
In other words, to reach a larger audience, you need other users to follow your profile. In this way, more and more people will be able to see the content that you and your brand publish.
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, for example, work like this.
Although you can find profiles and access their posts without necessarily following them, these social networks work by creating and developing audiences of followers.
In other words, the big profiles, generally of brands and celebrities, have a large number of followers, which makes their reach more people. With this, they have influence (in the case of celebrities) and more possibilities to sell (in the case of organizations).
Having a large audience is so important that Instagram, for example, only allows you to use some exclusive features if your profile reaches a certain number of followers.
Surely, you have already seen Instagram stories with links to external websites. The possibility of including them in this type of publication is only allowed after the profile reaches the figure of 10,000 followers. This makes many people desperate to reach that number.
Relationship
Social networks are true to their name: they are, at their core, social.
More than a redundant concept, it is necessary to understand that networks are communities that aim to facilitate relationships between people, and of course, businesses.
In this sense, the creation and nurturing of a large audience that is related to your profile is as important as the content you produce. At the end of the day, it is not enough just to create good publications, it is necessary to make them reach your audience.
From the entrepreneur’s point of view, social networks are essential tools for promoting, often organically, so that the same public, when stimulated, can multiply the contents of your profile.
It is precisely because of this need to increase the public that some people think of buying followers and speeding up the process.
Engagement
What many people forget is that, more than the number of followers, social networks value the engagement of the public with your profile.
Good engagement helps organizationsin addition to retaining customers and expanding the public organically and functionally.
For example, engagement is so important that the Instagram algorithm rules favor displaying posts in the feed according to relevance rather than chronological order.
This means that the application takes into account the interactions between profiles, the relationship, the user’s preferences and even the frequency of interaction to show a certain publication to the public.
That is, if you do not generate engagement with your audience and there is no reciprocity, it makes no sense to have an account with thousands of followers. People will not have access to your content.
Therefore, in order to reach more and more people, it is essential to get a large audience and, at the same time, to interact with your profile.
7 reasons NOT to buy followers
Now that you know the importance of having a large engaged audience, you must be thinking why not spend a portion of your marketing budget on buying followers.
As we told you before, the engagement of the public with your profile is more important than a large number of followers. What we still do not tell you is that you can lose much more.
You doubt it? Here are 7 reasons to convince yourself that buying followers is not a good deal.
1. Phantom crowd
If you have a business on Instagram and other social networks, surely your ultimate goal is to get more customers, right? Okay, followers only become customers when they really exist.
The problem with buying followers is that you are actually paying just to change the number displayed on your profile. This number corresponds to a bunch of fake profiles, created for the sole purpose of following people who purchase the “follower package”.
In practically all offers of this type, the follower packages are made up of fake accounts, inactive and probably hosted on servers in other countries, which have nothing to do with the profile of your organization.
The result is that when you decide to send a message to your followers, promote an offer or simply look for some type of interaction, you will be talking to an empty crowd, full of profiles that do not really exist.
2. Low engagement
When we see a large profile with a large and engaged audience, it is common to see thousands of likes and comments on posts. That means that the profile has a real audience that follows the posts, generating extremely strong engagement and ready to be worked on.
By buying followers, you are only acquiring a number on the profile and not all the benefits that a large organically acquired audience brings.
That is, your posts will probably continue to have a low number of likes and comments. Also, real followers may be put off and not engage with your profile as they will see your posts as unattractive, even though you have a large number of followers.
On the other hand, a low can harm the performance of your profile in the Instagram algorithm, for example, because this social network considers that a profile is relevant based on the interaction of the public with the publications.
A relevant profile for Instagram can be recommended to people who are interested in the same issues that this profile publishes. And if the “ghost audience” doesn’t engage, the chances of being recommended to real followers are slim to none.
3. Risk of suspension
Few things are more ignored than the famous “terms of use”. And on Instagram it is no different. It is very difficult to find someone who has read the terms of the application before creating an account.
Among various guidelines and rules, the Instagram document makes it clear that the platform is against any spam practice. In addition, the terms also make it very clear that Mark Zuckerberg’s network works continuously to eliminate all fake profiles present in it.
All this means that if you have ever bought followers on the network, it may be that your profile is in the crosshairs of Instagram. Among the penalties, there is the possibility of suspension of your account, which would cause you to lose all your work.
Do you know what the worst part is? That you accepted the terms, even if you have not read them. So there’s no use complaining.
4. Fluctuation in the number of followers
As we have just explained, Instagram is on a constant quest to eliminate fake profiles, mainly those used to inflate the number of followers.
Therefore, if you buy followers, you may realize that the size of your “audience” is constantly changing and always decreasing.
This happens because, as we said, the platform is constantly excluding and suspending fake user profiles, which are the “stuffing” of the follower packs.
Rather than seeing the number of followers on your profile constantly decreasing, you run the risk of entering a vicious cycle, in which you will continually buy new packs, as a way to compensate for the loss of deleted profiles.
In addition to being a never-ending story, you spend money that you could use to conquer an organic and real audience
5. Damage to the image of your business
Social networks, especially when they are for business, work from a credibility filter. And that goes far beyond the number of followers. In other words, an organization that is on Instagram has an image to watch over.
So if your real, engaged audience finds out that you artificially increased your follower count by buying packs, your organization’s image will be heavily damaged.
And in social networks, where everything revolves, almost literally, around the image, if you lose the trust of the public, you may never regain it.
If your real follower (and potential client) suspects that you are lying on your profile, with a false number of followers, it is very likely that they will start to doubt any information you post.
The result of this is obvious and tragic: fans who distrust a brand are unlikely to be its customers.
6. Non-existent sales
Let’s be objective: if you have a business on Instagram or any other social network, your intention is to get customers and increase sales, right? That is why it is so important to concentrate efforts on creating a committed and real public that can consume your products.
By purchasing follower packs, you are only purchasing a number on your profile, which does not correspond to the reality of your audience. The result is simple: none of the new “followers” will buy your product.
So, it is better to have an audience of 5,000 engaged followers who interact with your brand, than an army of 100,000 “zombie” profiles that are there just to make numbers.
7. Damage metrics
Business profiles on Instagram have a great advantage compared to personal profiles: the ability to analyze audience engagement data.
With an artificially inflated number of followers, projections of likes, comments, and other forms of public engagement become meaningless as they do not correspond to reality.
Therefore, the simple fact of buying followers harms even the use of Instagram and other social networks as means of analysis and audience segmentation.
7 tips to get more followers for FREE
So far we have only talked about the reasons not to buy followers. And, if you want to have a successful profile, you have probably already noticed that this type of strategy is counterproductive, right?
Although there is no quick and easy way to cultivate an audience of engaged followers who can become customers of your business, there are a number of…
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