Why Buying Instagram Followers Is Just Plain Awful
When you see Instagrammers who boast hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, it’s understandable that you want to see similar numbers for your own account. For many, this leads to the shady business of buying Instagram followers.
After all, for a relatively low cost, you can quickly buy a massive following — one that will no doubt impress others that stumble upon your account and gain you even more followers and engagement. That’s how it works, right? Not really. Ethical quandaries aside, there are plenty of reasons why buying Instagram followers is never a good idea.
1) Low Engagement
While you can easily buy followers to boost the size of your fan base, increasing engagement is another matter. Fake followers, often referred to as bots, typically don’t provide any form of engagement with your posts. These accounts are inactive beyond their only purpose — to follow a large number of Instagram accounts.
This often results in a huge disparity between the number of followers your account has and its level of audience engagement. While an account with 30,000 real followers could easily accrue a few hundred favorites on a typical post (as well as some comments and shares), an account with a similar number of mostly fake followers would be lucky to get more than a handful of favorites.
To potential customers, this can indicate one of two things — that your content is low-quality and therefore not worth engaging with, or that you’ve purchased most of your followers. Neither of these are the kind of impression you want to leave with your audience.
2) Nobody Likes a Fake
While it’s true that plenty of people buy followers on Instagram and other social media platforms, the general public still views this is a very shady practice. Even if you’re able to fool followers for a little while, chances are you won’t be able to for long.
As social media expert Ian Andersen Gray puts it, “People may not know that you’ve bought followers, but going from 30 followers or likes to 30,000 in the space of a couple of days is bound to get people suspicious, and then your integrity and reputation could well be in tatters.”
With the introduction of tools that determine if you have fake followers, it’s easier than ever for users to discover if you’ve been buying followers. This doesn’t sit well with regular consumers. You send your audience the message that you are willing to do pretty much anything to be perceived as popular, which will ultimately drive away the real Instagram users that you are so desperately trying to attract.
3) Wasting Money
If you decide to invest your Instagram marketing dollars into buying fake followers, you’ll be doing nothing more than throwing your money away. First and foremost, Instagram is cracking down on fake accounts, having deleted millions of bots and spam accounts since the end of 2014.
When you throw your money into buying Instagram followers, you won’t create an active, engaged audience that will grow your business. Instead, you’ll find yourself with an army of bots that doesn’t make purchases or do anything to share your content. Before long, even the goal of a high number of followers will be eliminated as Instagram removes your bought followers from its platform, leaving you in the exact position where you started.
Conclusion
If you choose to buy Instagram followers rather than grow them organically by producing high-quality content, you could easily find yourself left with an account that does nothing for your digital marketing efforts. Buying followers can ultimately do more harm than good as your Instagram account suffers from low engagement and poor public perception.
Grow your Instagram following the right way. Produce engaging, high-quality content that will connect with real Instagram users. It may take longer to build your following this way, but the end results will be much more valuable for your digital marketing efforts.
Interested in more Instagram marketing goodness? Check out our blog for more information! Looking forward to connecting!
