Buying Social Media Followers Online: Should You Do It?

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By now you have probably heard about the perils of buying social media followers online, maybe you’ve even considered the option for yourself. Do a quick Google search and you’ll find an overwhelming amount of options nearing 1.4 billion results.

Some promises you’ll see include:

Generate 100% real targeted fans, followers or views in a single order
No fake accounts or bots
Special techniques that broadcast your site to millions of online users
100% money back guarantee

First off, there is one thing I find very alarming that throws up an immediate red flag. There is absolutely no approval process for social media accounts to pay to receive fans. Meaning that no matter who you are or what you sell, these people can just sell you fans and followers in denominations of your choosing.

It is an insult to your intelligence that someone would even blatantly promise this to you without knowing anything about your business.

The Shady Business Practices of These Companies

One of the more disturbing things I found was coming across two separate websites (results #1 & #2 on Google) that were duplicates of each other with the name changed and the homepage video done by two different people…using the exact same script!

Watch this video…

Now watch this one…sound familiar?

When you see this, you need to ask yourself how credible this type of service is.

Guess what…even if you got 10,000 new followers tomorrow, how will you engage them?

You’ll still need great content.

If you have 10,000 followers tomorrow, how will you make that next step to get them interested in your products or services? The survival of your business depends on thinking about these questions.

Have Realistic Expectations

Here’s the thing, I’m not saying that it doesn’t help to have more followers, especially when new people find you and are trying to measure your credibility. What I am saying is these services generally wind up getting abused and creating more of a disservice to those who use them.

The worst part is that 99% of people will just ignore you and forget about you rather than actually reach out and tell you why they decided you were not worth connecting with. You could do this and go months or even years without know what’s wrong!

You will not get any engagement from using these services, I can absolutely guarantee that. If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. It’s very simple to find Facebook pages with a lot of likes but little engagement.

Nobody can rationalize that as an effective social media strategy because it isn’t.

So what’s the worst that could happen? A few things come to mind:

You are (almost definitely) breaking Terms of Service with the sites in question
You risk getting banned or potentially even deleted (to be honest, I have not heard of this happening but why risk it?)
Most importantly…you will look about as cool as someone that needs to pay people to come to their birthday party

There is only one way to get fans and followers and unfortunately, it does NOT happen over night. It takes a long-term commitment of providing quality content, engaging the right audience and staying consistent with your strategy for at least 12 months. The kind of promises these companies make that sell followers absolutely will not translate into the kind of ROI that will pay your mortgage.