Should you buy followers for your social media page?

Follower count isn’t everything, but it’s great social proof! As a person coming to your page for the first time, one of the first things I’ll notice is the number of followers you have.

Generally, most people would assume that more followers = more credibility. Thus, comes the pressure for social media managers to buy followers. These can come for cheap, even for less than 2 cent per follower.

It is however, a practice we do not recommend. Here’s why.

1) Page purges

Firstly, many of the followers are from fake accounts. Or rather, bots. This allows the vendor to flood a page with as many followers as you’ll pay for. Social Media pages periodically run purges from time to time. A purge removes inactive or fake accounts from the social media platform, which means you’ll lose those followers over time.

2) Wrong target audience

What real benefits do these new followers bring you? The bought followers would never engage with your page (unless you decide to buy likes for your posts too…), would never spread word about your business and would never buy your products and services. From the onset, bought followers are not your target audience and will not contribute directly to your growth.

3) Social Media platform algorithms

In fact, the lack of engagement from bought followers actually hurts your page. Social Media platforms have algorithms to determine if a page is actually interesting to its audiences; so if you have an extremely low page engagement compared to the number of fans you have, the platform algorithm might work against your favour and push your posts out to less real followers.

So what should you do to get more followers?

It might sound cliché, but the best option is really to make your content valuable and engaging to your target audiences. It might take longer, but you’ll get real followers who are actually interested in what you have to say and promote.

Explore different types of content, including giveaways, reposts and tips to bring some vibrance (and followers) to your page.

You can also create ads with ‘likes’ objective, which would help with spreading awareness and encourage your target audience to like your page.