When you’re struggling to gain traction quickly on your business social media platforms, ads that promise lots of followers for a “low, low price” can be tempting. However, when it comes to follower count, QUALITY is more important than QUANTITY. Resisting the urge to believe the hype and buy followers can save you a lot of hassle in the long run and avoid damaging your brand.
Fake followers hurts your engagement rate.
One of your primary goals on Instagram should be to have a high engagement rate. *Engagement rate = all engagement on a post (including comments, likes, and saves) divided by the the number of impressions, or people who have seen your post. When a post receives a significant amount of engagement, it tells the Instagram algorithm that users are enjoying the content. As a result of the engagement, Instagram will push the post for more users to enjoy.
Having a large sum of followers (that are likely from another country, irrelevant to your business, or even “bots”) destroys your engagement rate because it tells Instagram that you have thousands of followers, but only a small percentage of those followers engage with your content. Instagram will then not deem your content as valuable and your real followers who DO value your content will have less likelihood of seeing it.
Fake followers limit your ad retargeting capabilities.
If you ever look to run Facebook or Instagram ads for your business, Facebook’s Ads Manager offers the ability to retarget your Instagram following with ads. If you’ve been buying fake followers, there is no easy way to make sure your ads are only being shown to your real followers. This means you’ll have to pay to show your ads to your fake followers too – a total waste of your valuable ad budget.
Fake followers damage your credibility.
It isn’t hard to spot an account with fake followers. If your account has 20,000 followers, but only has 20 to 30 likes on your post, it is a complete giveaway. Potential clients or customers may see this and intentionally not buy from you because your social media accounts look fishy. They may even think your business is fake!
Hopefully this convinces you to not buy any fake followers for your business! If you’re looking for social media assistance, the TrustWorkz team can help. Contact us to chat about how we can help your business organically grow your social media accounts without having to buy followers!
