Don’t be vain!!

Today I’m going to talk about why you should not buy followers.

I talk a lot in my training for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.  About how it is important to have the right kind of followers. I talk about the vanity metrics versus the sanity metrics.  You want to make sure that the people who follow you are engaging with your account and that they enjoy the content you are putting out.

How people get fake followers.

This is by no means a guide on how to get fake followers. It is important that you understand how people do it. When I say “don’t buy followers”, some people think I mean don’t run an ad on Facebook to get more likes on your page. This is not the case.  Facebook Ads don’t attract fake followers. There are a few ways you can get fake followers. First, you can do an aggressive follow campaign on Twitter or Instagram. This is where you follow lots of accounts in the hope they will follow you back and then you unfollow them all.

Or you can just throw money at it. There are businesses that are completely based on getting fake followers. Take Instagram, for example.  There is a site called Buzzoid where you can buy followers, likes and views. There are packages to suit all budgets. Once you get the fake followers you surely will want to fake likes so it looks like you have engagement, right?

If you don’t continue to buy fake likes and fake followers it’s gonna show on your stats! People will start to question the legitimacy of your statistics or you will go broke continuing to support your fake habit.

What you should concentrate on.
You need to leave aside the vanity metrics and concentrate on the sanity.

Vanity numbers aren’t important. What is important:

• People are engaging with you on a regular basis.
• Traffic is coming to your website. Be sure you have Google Analytics setup and monitoring the insights on a regular basis.
• How many leads you are getting from social media

It’s all well and good spending money buying followers but if that’s not translating into sales or leads it’s just a waste of your time and money!

My top 5 reasons why you shouldn’t buy followers

Top 5 reasons not to buy fake followers

1. It goes against the terms and conditions for almost every social media network. They have strong policies against fake followers and they will delete and ban accounts that buy fake followers. Getting banned from a popular site like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook would be terrible for your business. Imagine losing out on access to these free markets.
2. Not your real audience!! I spend a lot of time talking to my clients about who their audience is. Your audience doesn’t have to be one persona. Your business can have more than one target one audience. You need to identify who it is and be sure that that is your actual audience. The goal of social media is not about having the biggest following.  it should be about connecting with your customer building a community, creating something engaging.
3. Your engagement will decrease by adding followers that don’t interact with your account. Having followers who don’t engage will result in dropping engagement. This is particularly true of Facebook and Instagram. These platforms are subject to algorithms that decide who sees your content based on the engagement of your followers.
4. You will mess with your ads targeting. Look Facebook ads are a whole other section that I will cover BUT if you are buying fake followers you are probably the person who clicks on “boost” a post anyway so I have to put this in. If you boost a post to be seen by people who like your page and you have fake followers you really are wasting your money a second time!
5. Online reputation on your social media is everything. You need to be transparent with all of your ideas and what it is you stand for. It WILL be embarrassing for you and your brand when you are found out. It is not a matter of if will you be found out, it is more like when will I be found out?! Someone may use an app like Social Blade or fake followers to check and see what percentage of your account is actually fake followers. Recently Twitter did quite a big purge and many people within social media and other Industries lost a lot of followers. You really don’t want to end up in the same boat. It can result in customers losing their trust in you.

So, in conclusion, don’t #fakeit

Being famous on instagram is like being rich in monopoly.