Are you contemplating buying Twitter followers or maybe followers on Facebook, Instagram or other social media platforms? Answer this question first: Is it more important to have thousands of fans/followers or 100 who actually share, like, comment and engage with your business?
This is one question you will never hear from the plethora of social media channels who want to sell you followers. Why? Buying you followers boosts their numbers.
Don’t get us wrong, everyone would like to boost the number of followers or fans but like Guy Kawasaki says, “There are two kinds of people on social networks: those who want more followers and those who are lying.” We can’t say that we disagree, because he’s right.
Comparing your business with the number of followers your competitor has can be depressing especially when you’re starting from scratch but remember numbers aren’t everything – and – not all metrics are the same.
The social media world is built around numbers but some numbers are more important than others. Yes, having a large number of followers looks good when people go to your page but there are other metrics far more important – like:
- How many people regularly engage with your page
- How many people/businesses have added you to a Twitter list
- How many leads are you getting from social media
- How much traffic is being driven back to your website via social media
So let’s stop looking at the number of followers/fans and start looking at things that matter!
Back to the real reason behind this blog post: Why is buying followers so bad?
Low engagement – Low edgerank
Keep in mind, you’re merely buying numbers. You’re not getting people who are actually interested or willing to engage with your pages. And, the majority of these followers are bots or fake accounts. Let’s say you buy followers for your Twitter page and overnight – BAM – you have 38,000 followers. We can guarantee you that most if not all are fake accounts which brings down your engagement and edgerank numbers. The important numbers – remember?
You become a spammer
Some sinister Twitter Follower services will ask to access your Twitter account to send out messages that advertise how they increase followers. This is only going to annoy your followers which in turn…
You lose integrity and reputation
Unfortunately, morality is probably the most difficult thing to define in this crazy world we live in. Everyone has their own morality meter but it’s fair to say that people buying followers have a low business morality meter. If you had 4 followers yesterday and overnight you increase that by tens of thousands, don’t you think your followers will notice?
You will go to Twitter or Facebook Jail
It happens every day – someone gets found out. It’s not hard to figure out who’s being followed by fake accounts – just click on one of the profiles and you will see. Most have photos of celebrities and their profiles just never make sense – or – they’re from another country. Want to know how many fake followers they have? Check them out on Fake Followers Check
Let’s talk about Facebook jail – there are over 83 MILLION fake Facebook accounts according to Facebook – however – Facebook is now removing fake likes from pages and in some cases removing pages altogether.
What’s the moral of this story? The number of followers you have really isn’t that important. Try to make an effort not to play the numbers game and be impressed that the followers you have are building a community of people actually interested in your or your product. If you do, you will definitely reap the rewards.
Next week’s post – How to Build Followers the Right Way! Don’t miss it!
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