Buying A Social Following Can Hurt You!
Someone recently asked me online how they could get more Likes or Followers on their FB Page. Before I could answer someone else jumped in the thread and told this person to BUY likes and followers.
SMH, This is a bad idea.
Now I know it can be discouraging. You take all this time to create a nice FB page or even a website, and you start putting out content regularly, you try to build up your brand but not getting the traffic you expected. Weeks, maybe months have passed and you only have a few scattered likes and followers. You type into google how to get more followers and all these services pop up saying you can pay “200” dollars for “10,000” followers! That looks pretty nice to you right about now.
Please, don’t do this, it will hurt you in the long run.
For 99.99% of these services, the accounts are either; bots or ghost followers. Your not getting a real, engaging audience, your just getting a bigger number under your followers, a number that will hurt you. Some may not care and want to add bots or ghost followers just to appear to others that they have a following, although this may sound nice, again, this will hurt you.
You see when you add a bunch of ghost followers or bots, that’s a huge percentage of your audience that is not engaging with your content, thus bringing down your engagement rate down dramatically. Facebook and Instagram will see this and think that no one finds your content interesting because out of the 10,000 people that follow you only 10 people engaged with the content. This will lower your ranking and position in search results.
So all in all, buying Followers is definitely not a good idea, the only way I would endorse the idea is if a new company(all the ones right now are not legit, unless you know of one, let me know in the comments) got a bunch of social users to sign up with them, categorize those social users by interests and hobbies and then those users got paid for engaging/following with the companies clients that they we’re actually interested in. That would be the basic model needed for me to get behind it, because as of right now, most if not all services only offer bots or ghost followers, which are not doing you any good.
What about Likes?
Now, buying Likes, in my opinion, can’t hurt anything other than your wallet. If there are any negatives that I am missing please feel free to comment below. Buying likes can get you some decent traffic and exposure. If you have a particular hashtag on one of your posts and you go to that hashtags feed and see the top posts have around 5000 likes, so you buy 6000 likes for that post, now you are being displayed in the “Top Posts” Section, which offers a lot of visibility.
How to Grow Your Facebook Following, The Right Way
There’s no way to hack your way to the top, if there was than everybody would be up here. Instead of wasting money buying bots and ghost followers, why not do it the right way and spend that money on Ad Campaigns that will result in your brand growing a truly unique, engaged, and loyal audience.
You do not need to spend a million dollars on advertising, you can do as little as $5 a day and see results, but the more money you put in the more results you will see and the faster they will come.
If you need help on a FB Ad strategy check out my “3 Steps to FB Advertising on a Budget”.
You also do not need to spend any money if you don’t want to, you can go completely organic and engage with social users, join groups, and place free ads where they are allowed, its all in how you go about it, I have ran some really successful campaigns that were 100% organic, so I know anyone can pull it off.
The bottom line is, you can not hack your way to the top buying followers. You need to put in the work like the rest of us. Engage with your audience, Post interesting content on a regular basis, always look for creative ways to grow.
Remember what I always say: Creativity is King!
Good Luck
Evan
@ Digital Clinic
