Why You Should Never Buy Twitter Followers or Facebook Likes
Many business owners, impatient with the slow growth in the number of followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook, resort to buying them. What they don’t know or prefer to ignore is that such activities can work against the interest of their business in the long run.
There are a number of services which claim that they can get you more Likes or Followers on social media. But the question really is whether you would like to have a thousand Likes on your page without any real engagement or start a real conversation even if it’s only with a hundred (real) people. Most business owners who would choose to buy social media Likes and followers would rather not answer this question.
Some people also try to increase their followers on Twitter by aggressively following others, hoping that they would follow back. And if this doesn’t happen, they simply unfollow all those people. Such a practice is called churning and there is actually a policy at Twitter against it.
People may buy Likes or followers on social media accounts for two reasons. First, they hope these ‘fans/followers’ might engage with them. Second, they want to show that they are popular and buying Likes and followers is one way to keep appearances. But here are few reasons why you should abstain from taking this approach.
The results don’t stay for long
If you buy Likes or followers, it is a given that they will not stay for long. Steven J Wilson at Highpoweredseo.com conducted an experiment where he created a dummy account on Twitter and bought followers. He found that over time, many of these followers left him. In a 6 week period, he lost about 35% of the followers he had bought. When he went back to the account after the 7th week, he saw that he was still losing followers.
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The accounts are not real
If you visit some of the accounts of your followers, you will find that many of them are not real accounts. How can you tell a real account from a fake one? For one, a fake account won’t have a profile picture. They might also have just one or two posts, and those too will be from the time they were created.
The numbers are only for show
If you think the fans or followers you have bought will yeild any engagement, think again. They are not going to share or retweet your posts, which is one way of determining that you haven’t achieved any engagement.
Social media sites might label you as a spammer
Buying Likes and followers might do more to hurt your brand than anything else. You will not only lose credibility (someone is bound to notice that you just went from 50 followers to 5000 followers overnight), but such activities are also treated as spam by social media sites. If a social media site labels you as a spammer, you will lose some privileges on your account. You won’t be able to add fans organically and will end up losing any real followers you may have.
Adding Likes and followers organically on social media sites can be a slow process, but the rewards are worth it. Buying Likes and followers will only prove detrimental to your marketing efforts and should be avoided without doubt.
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