Although it sounds like a good idea, it’s not worth buying followers on Instagram. This practice can even yield a good following in the short term, but the damage it can mean to your organization is devastating, especially for on the long term.
To prevent you investing in this kind of practice, we wrote this post. Here, we’ll show you why it’s not worth it to buy followers on Instagram and what are the possible losses involved on this kind of practice.
You will be followed by fake profiles
One of the biggest problems investing in buying followers on Instagram is that most of these profiles will be fake and not used by real people.
With this, you will have the false sense that your message is reaching a large number of people, when in fact your company will speak to no one..
By buying followers, your posts will have only a few views, likes, and comments, even if your company has thousands of followers in your profile.
And this may even disturb the experience of your real followers, who will have the impression that your content is unattractive, because even with thousands of followers, only a few people interact with your company.
Your followers will not interact with your brand content
Engaging your customers with your company’s Instagram posts is important as the number of followers you have.
Through engagement you may engage your current customers and gain new followers, making your brand part of the day-to-day life of your customers and possibly appearing on Instagram’s explore tab.
More engaged customers, means your business can increase the number of visits on your site and even the number of leads generated from your digital marketing strategy.
Penalty policies
In addition to undermining your brand image buying followers may cause a problem between your company and Instagram itself.
This is because Instagram is totally against any kind of spam and works continuously to eliminate all false profiles that are created on the platform, as it makes clear in its term of use.
So if you do buy followers and have many fake profiles following you on Instagram, your profile may be penalized in some way.
Your brand may suffer
In addition to damaging the experience of its users, buying followers for Instagram can generate huge damages to the image of your brand.
That’s because as soon as your real customers realize that your company has bought followers, they may feel like they’ve been fooled by your company, weakening confidence in your brand as a whole.
And discovering that there has been purchase of followers, your customer may begin to doubt other information your company discloses about itself, such as your number of customers, the efficiency of your products and services and even the prices charged by them.
After all, if you’ve been able to lie about your number of followers, it’s hard to believe that your company is not able to distort other information to gain visibility, through whatever means available.
Make no mistake: the job of regaining the credibility of your brand and the trust of your customers is much greater than the work of gathering real followers on Instagram.
Your number of followers may vary greatly
As Instagram continually works to eliminate fake profiles by buying followers, the number of followers in your company can vary greatly, creating instability that can undermine your strategy.
This ends up generating a vicious circle where your company needs to buy followers on a continuous basis to keep the number of followers constantly growing. This entails an unnecessary cost to maintain your strategy, causing your company to waste money, which could be used in differente and more efficient strategies.
This variation in the number of followers will be much lower if you invest in gathering real followers.
Your followers will not consume your company’s products
Many marketers are frustrated because, even with an big number of followers on Instagram, their profiles can’t generate sales.
With this, they end up not investing properly on social media, seeking other promotional strategies to achieve their goals.
What they do not know is that part of this problem generated by buying followers for your profile on Instagram. As most of these followers are fake profiles, it is impossible for them to consume the products and services offered by your company.
This greatly weakens your return on investment in your Instagram strategy, possibly making your company’s profits much lower than expected.
Relevance
With each change on the algorithm of Instagram, your posts needs to be relevant to be seen by other users, and this heavily depends on the mutual interaction between you and your followers.
Fake followers do not engage with your profile or post any content that you can interact with. Meaning that, at best, they will do nothing towards your relevance score on Instagram.
The number of followers is just one among the various metrics you should track
Many companies forget that the number of followers on Instagram or any other social media is just one of several metrics that can be used to measure the success of their Instagram strategy.
It should be clear at this point that gaining followers should not be your only concern when building a business profile on Instagram. In addition to the number of followers you have, you need to keep track of the engagement rate, traffic and sales generated by Instagram and even the quality of your audience for other uses such as remarketing on Facebook.
Now that you know why it’s not worth it to buy followers on Instagram, it’s time to build a really effective strategy for your business with real interactions and stimulating content.