We did the one thing that everybody in the social media world looks down on.
We bought fake social media followers.
why?
Because science…
Maybe not science. But we did want to find out if a bigger following would impact the growth
and engagement the account could generate.
We found a sketchy looking website which promised us they could provide us with 10,000
followers in less than 24 hours for no more than 50 great British pounds.
Hesitation set in for a second.
We asked ourselves, what would our current followers think?
Then we took some time to balance the pros and cons (roughly 20 seconds) and whilst swiftly
reaching for our card and securing our new army of thriving fans.
It was only a matter of time until we were insta-famous.
Sure enough, they arrived.
We'd made it.
We were once a simple page with a few thousand followers. Merely a grain of sand on the beach
of Instagram. But now, we were a force to be reckoned with.
To cut a long story short, the followers quickly began to decline.
Massively.
Either the new (fake) fans that had begun following us had got cold feet. Or our original
followers were onto us.
Either way, it wasn't good.
So here are 3 key reasons (from the many) why you should NEVER buy followers or subscribers
for any social media account.
Follower counts don't mean shit for brands
We use social media to be social. Not to engage with brands.
To buy followers for your business to make your account look better will not (I REPEAT, WILL
NOT) help you towards any form of business objective.
Unless your business objective is to p*&s money up the wall. In that case, fill your boots.
But I can certainly think of better ways to spend £50.
Although Instagram and Facebook do limit the amount of organic engagement you can achieve,
it's still nice to know how effective your content is at engaging with your audience.
If your follower count goes up significantly with fake followers, but the followers who engage
with your posts stays the same, you're going to look pretty bloody stupid when only 20 people
are liking your posts out of the 20,000 that follow you.
It's far better to have 1000 people who truly love what you do as opposed to 100,000 who (quite
frankly) don't care less.
In his famous article, 1000 True Fans, Kevin Kelly explains that you don't need to have millions
of followers to make a comfortable living.
Instead, focus on just finding 1000 people who truly love what you do, and focus on serving
them.
So the next time you're worrying about how many followers you have, just remember no one
cares about 'the number'.
What they care about are the experiences you provide them, the value you can deliver and how
you can help them.
Focus less on numbers and more on how you make people feel.
