Should you buy followers?

Let’s face it: no matter if you’re running a small personal Instagram account or a massive Facebook page for a company, it feels good to see that follower count go up. Maybe it’s something in our animal brains that just makes it feel like a win. But if you’re trying to run a business, that number going up means more than a little rush of dopamine. Followers mean people are interested in your business and – hopefully – will become customers or clients someday. So it can be tempting to think: why don’t I just buy followers? But while this may seem like a tempting prospect, there are plenty of reasons why buying followers could even hurt your business. Here’s what you need to know.

The case for buying followers

In order to be as fair as possible, we’re going to present the benefits of buying followers. Before we get to the cons, here are the pros:

Number goes up.

And…that’s pretty much it. Buying followers will make your follower count higher, which could earn you some surface-level prestige.

But people don’t decide to give a business money based on follower count alone. It can be a factor – you probably don’t want to do business with a page with 0 followers – but it’s not the factor. Follower count usually is, at the end of the day, a vanity metric. Artificially inflating your numbers might feel good in the moment, but it can cause serious damage to your reputation. Here are the reasons why you shouldn’t buy followers.

Susceptibility to user purges

Buying followers can give you a temporary boost in numbers, it’s true. But unfortunately, most (or all!) of these users will be fake and/or bots – which means that you could lose them all the next time the platform decides to do a purge, leading to a huge drop in your followers. That doesn’t look good in the eyes of your customers – or the almighty algorithm. A temporary rise isn’t worth the inevitable fall.

Decrease in engagement

Follows are great, but likes, comments, and shares are more valuable. If you’re buying followers, what’s the effect on those other metrics? In the words of Pete Campbell – not great, Bob! At best, you’ll get no increase in your interactions. If you’ve got loads of followers but almost no engagement on your posts, things start to feel fishy – and your stats on engagement as a percentage of your followers will actually go down. So how is that the best-case scenario? Well, because the alternative – fake and/or bot comments – is far worse.

Fake engagement

We’ve all seen it in the wild – those comments like “Good post!” Or “Nice pic!” Or “Great job, I love your content!” In theory, could they have been written by a human? Sure, but it’s not likely – especially when the comments section is filled with them. It’s uncanny and is easily spotted as fake by the average user. Worse than that, it can seriously damage your credibility. Not every piece of fake engagement has been paid for, but if your comments section is always filled with it and it doesn’t get removed (you are moderating your comments, right?), it starts to give your page the stink of desperation and erodes user trust.

Waste of money

Nothing comes for free – even scores of fake users for your page. The money you spend on artificially inflating your following could be much better spent on increasing your true reach. Instead of paying for bots, invest in advertising and quality content. It’s more work, but it will pay off in a way that fake followers never can.

Poor targeting

Let’s just say that you buy followers and they happen to all be real people. (Highly unlikely, but let’s think pie-in-the-sky best-case scenario.) If they’re all real, they could become real customers eventually, right? But if your business has any kind of local focus, remember that the followers you buy could be from anywhere. Therefore, there’s not even an isolated chance that they could become a future customer. If you’re a plumber in Ohio, you’re not going to gain anything by adding a new follower from Dubai. Again, it’s a waste of money – and, due to the ick factor of fake engagement – a damaging waste at that.

Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to success. Buying followers may feel good in the moment, but it can ultimately cause more harm than good. At the end of the day, the number of followers you have isn’t nothing – but it’s not everything, either. By focusing on putting out quality content and nurturing real leads, you’ll be in much better shape than if you had shelled out for fake followers.