Are you really grafting and getting no rewards on Social and thinking you may just cut some corners and buy some social following? Well, let me explain why you should keep fighting the good fight and not just splash your cash on a bunch of bots following you.
Following is often the metric that people think they need to increase so they think getting that number up by buying likes seems like a logical option but can be detrimental to a number of other metrics in the future.
Here are 5 quick reasons why you shouldn’t buy your followers. By Karl, the Clockwork Moggy Social media manager.
1. It’s often pretty obvious.
Jumping thousands of likes can be a pretty obvious process and people will know you have bought likes. This doesn’t look great for your brand and can build distrust in you and your services. Buying likes can make you look desperate, unauthentic and can really affect your brand integrity (if you can lie about that what else in the process will you lie about?). If you have 30,000 likes and 3 likes on a post something won’t add up and it will look pretty bad. Which leads me to point two…
2. Engagement Rates at an all-time low
When you pay for fake likes, follows or subscribers you aren’t buying a load of people interacting with your business you are buying a load of fake profiles created by a robot (that look extremely fake) to like/follow your brand. These accounts will never interact with your business in a personal way.
Facebook’s algorithm really punishes fake followers. It shows people your posts and gauges the reactions to it compared to the amount of likes you have on your page. It then uses this engagement rate to determine how good your post is and push it out to more people. So if you have 100 likes on your page and your posts get 30 engagements it will show it to more people as it determines your following are interested. If you have 4,000 likes and only 20 likes it will quell your post. So although your page looks like its growing the engagement, a killer metric, is what gets affected.
3. Throws out ad campaigns.
An effective way of promoting to people you know are interested in your brand is to promote to people who follow your page and their friends. These are people who are interested or potentially have similar interests. Your new bought following don’t have any friends (well real-life ones) and you will be wasting your time and money promoting to them and your friends and getting zero return on investment.
4. Stats will be screwed.
When you come to check out your stats 2 years down the line when you are looking to start a new campaign, Facebook ads etc, and you go to look at your demographics to ensure you are targeting the right people. Yours will be skewed as the likes you buy are often completely random so your stats will often show wrong. This can lead to promoting to the wrong people and make your marketing campaigns less effective.
5. It’s against the terms of service.
Nothing would suck more than having your account taken down because you bought some likes online. You won’t necessarily be caught instantaneously but bots are constantly deleted and if you are found to do it your account will be punished. There are loads of guides available online on how to spot fake followers. Let me know if you want me to share one?
