Why You Need to Stop Buying Followers on Instagram
Why do You Need to Stop Buying Followers on Instagram?
Sometimes in business, all you want is that quick fix, the shortcut to success that will see you fly past your competitors and straight to the top of the ladder. Sometimes these shortcuts can work. Maybe, sometimes, you’ll be able to ‘game’ a system, establish your business as trustworthy, and only then abandon the ‘shortcut’ practices that you used to get you to a great position.
One of these tactics that has proved pretty popular in the past is the buying of Instagram followers. A number of different businesses, influencers and even just users have used this practice in an attempt to inflate their own statistics, but nowadays this tactic is going to get you nowhere. In this blog, we’ll be running you through why people buy followers, how the process works, and why, at the end of the day, you need to stop buying followers on Instagram.
Why Do People Buy Followers on Instagram?
Think about how you determine how trustworthy a brand is that you see on Instagram. Think about how you decide whether or not to trust an influencer. Often, one of the first metrics users look at is the number of followers the account has.
So, if a brand can find a way to pad out their followers in order to attract those all-important leads, they will often start by buying fake followers. This is because the Instagram universe is all about perception.
If a brand can show that they have thousands of followers, other users are more likely to place their trust in them and make purchases or follow the brand.
“So many users judge Instagram profiles or business accounts purely by simple measurable numbers. It almost makes sense to go about buying fake Instagram followers, then attracting real users, before discarding these fake users once you have a solid following.”
As well as this, the ease at which you can buy Instagram followers often encourages brands further. The temptation to look as if your business is as, if not more, popular than your competitors is a great draw. And if it only takes a couple of easy steps and as little as $3 to grow your following in this way, it shouldn’t surprise us that many businesses do go about buying fake Instagram followers.
How to Go About Buying Followers on Instagram
Buying followers is a really easy, really cheap process. All you need to do is link your account to a service such as SmmPoint, Skweezer or Mr.insta, make a payment and see your follower numbers explode. It’s relatively cheap. On Skweezer for example, you can get 250 followers for as little as $7, or a huge 20,000 followers for a slightly more expensive $149. You may notice, if your curiosity is piqued and you decide to check-out one of these sites, that they advertise as supplying ‘real followers’. Essentially, what they mean by this is that, rather than being followed by bots, you will be followed by what are known as ‘zombie’ accounts. These accounts are essentially inactive accounts that have been appropriated by bots, so don’t be fooled by the thought that you’re about to have 1000 real, active human beings eagerly waiting for your posts.
Or, sometimes, they may be genuine accounts, but for reasons we will explain shortly, they are of little more use than the bot or zombie accounts that you really don’t want associated with your brand.Some of the services you will come across look to follow other users, aiming to get those users to follow you back. This however, rarely works. Any decent quality, real life accounts are unlikely to follow a brand back that they haven’t heard of. Especially if it looks as if the account is spammy and is buying followers. The fact is, real users can tell if your account is buying followers on Instagram. How?
1. Say Goodbye to Engagement
The most detrimental aspect of buying followers on Instagram becomes apparent when you look at the engagement rates on accounts that have bought followers. Most of the time, the accounts are bots, and even if they are real people, they aren’t going to be liking or commenting on your posts. It’s all very well having huge numbers of followers, but if none of them is engaging with you, what does that say to an outsider? If you’re a business, you’re clearly not engaging your audience, if you’re an influencer, you clearly aren’t influencing people. You may seem some early engagement, but this will quickly taper off.
“Engagement is what Instagram uses to determine what posts will show up in users feeds and on Explore Pages. If you’re not getting any engagement, it’s unlikely that any new users will find your page organically.”
Real users will also notice this discrepancy in followers and engagement. 10,000 followers and 4 likes per post? That just looks wrong. If your target audience looks any deeper at your following, you’ll find you experience the following problem.
2. Buying Followers on Instagram Can Destroy Your Credibility
If a prospective follower or customer was to stumble across your Instagram account and saw that you had a high follower account, they might be interested in checking out your content. Then, they might be confused by the low numbers of engagement on your posts. Of course, since the removal of Instagram likes on posts, they won’t be able to see this, but they’ll certainly take notice of the non-existent comments. This might push them to have a look at who your following is.
They would then be confronted by a combination of bots, accounts that follow thousands but have no followers, or accounts that have never posted anything. All of that, as well as accounts that just look seriously low quality.
What will the user do next? They’ll be out of there. There’s no chance they’re going to follow a business that is so clearly trying to artificially inflate their metrics and essentially mislead users.And if word gets out? If this is the reputation your brand builds from the start? You may as well remove yourself from Instagram altogether and accept the loss of a really lucrative marketing platform.
“Your brand integrity is absolutely vital to your success. If customers can’t trust your brand then you’ll never make sales, you’ll never establish brand advocacy. Don’t give your target audience a reason to lose trust in you”
Building trust and brand advocacy are one of the most difficult, but most rewarding tasks you can undertake as a business. It’s all too easy to disregard this when you’re looking to get your business off the ground, but you should never compromise your brand integrity.
3. Weird Comments and Spam
When you do get engagement after buying followers on Instagram, it’s pretty likely they aren’t going to do you many favours.
In a worst-case scenario, you’ll end up with comments that promote extreme political groups, adult products or something illicit. Not the kind of engagement that reflects well on your brand. You could get comments from your low-quality followers in different languages to hide what a comment is saying. In other cases, you might get bot accounts making automated comments on your posts in a bid to mimic real engagement. Comments like ‘cool post’ and ‘awesome picture’ don’t offer any value, they look strange, and they just put off real users. In other awkward scenarios, these automated comments can just be really inappropriate. A post that is based on a terrorist incident or some other dark news story would hardly merit the comment ‘looks awesome!’.
“Some of the followers you have bought will be bots, as we discussed, some will be low quality accounts and in some cases, they will be fronts for spam. These followers will find a way to harvest your email address and the email addresses of your real followers, and then the spamfest will begin.”
It’s up to you to protect your real audience members from these types of fake accounts, so don’t allow them access to your feed.
4. Buying Followers Won’t Last
Instagram is clamping down on the buying of fake followers. The entire premise of Instagram is to provide its users with a great experience. Fake accounts aren’t exactly conducive with this. They don’t post enjoyable content, they don’t interact in a meaningful way with other users, and they mislead users, inflating metrics and twisting perception.
For these reasons, they have been focusing on purging fake accounts from the platform. Regular efforts to identify and remove fake accounts from the platform means that your follower count, provided it is made up of predominantly fake followers, will drop back down to its original count relatively quickly. You’ll have spent money to boost one metric, only to see that exact same metric plummet once your fake followers are identified by Instagram. In fact, Instagram might not leave you alone once they’ve removed your followers.
“Buying followers on Instagram is against the platform’s Terms of Service, and there have been incidents where accounts that have been caught taking part in these practices have had their accounts suspended.”
It’s pretty clear that if you’re going to succeed in your marketing efforts on Instagram, you’re going to need your account to be active.
5. Buying Followers on Instagram Won’t Make You Sales
The bottom line. We’ve already discussed the fact that fake accounts won’t engage with your posts. Or if they do, they’ll engage in ways that impact negatively your marketing efforts.
But at the end of the day, a bot is not going to buy from you. The entire point of growing a follower base, of nurturing them with quality posts and engaging content, of building trust and encouraging interaction with your brand, is to make sales.
An automated account or a follower with the single aim of spreading spam is not going to visit your site or store and buy a product from you. An increased follower count means nothing if it doesn’t help to increase sales. And it means even less if it doesn’t even attract new, real followers.
“You have to understand that users are becoming savvier these days. They’re becoming more switched on to fake accounts and spam. Your target audience is extremely likely to lose trust in your product, your business and your brand if it looks like you’re trying to mislead them.”
And these are the people you want to be following your brand. These are the users that will buy from you and make you into a profitable business. You need to pour your effort into growing your Instagram following in the right way. Focus on getting to know your audience (your real audience) and aim to engage them in a way that will make them genuinely interested in your brand. Provide great quality, relevant content. Consider the way you advertise on the platform carefully. Building a good quality, organic Instagram following can be a tough process, but the rewards if you succeed are staggering.
For example, 75% of users that see a brand’s post like to visit the website of the business. If you want to show off your business in the best possible light, Instagram is the place to do it.
It is not the place to start buying followers in an effort to seem like an extremely popular brand. Ensure your campaigns are transparent and respect your audience by showing them the true value of your company, and you should see some great results on what is a marketing platform with huge potential.
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