Why You Shouldn’t Buy Instagram Followers

We get it! Promoting your business on social media is hard. Gaining organic growth takes a long time and as a small business, you don’t always have time. You might think there is one easy solution: buy Instagram followers. However, there are some important reasons why you should never do that. In this post, we’ll tell you why this is the case and what you can do as an alternative.

Reasons You Shouldn’t Buy Followers

You might be asking yourself, but buying Instagram followers sounds easy, why shouldn’t I do it? Well, these are just a few of the reasons why.

Instagram Can Tell

The main goal of most social media platforms is to promote authenticity. Clearly, fake followers are not authentic. As such, Instagram has been cracking down on bots on its platform since 2018 and is constantly on the hunt. They know what to look for, even if the average user doesn’t, and they do punish accounts that purchase these followers.

It Will Damage Your Analytics

When you buy followers, your follower count will be high, but your engagement levels will be low. This because purchased followers do not interact with your social media posts. It will also be hard to figure out if you are reaching your marketing goals because of your decreased engagement. 

You Will Lose Partnerships

After a quick look through your account, any future partners will know something is wrong. You may have an appealing number of followers visible on your profile, but fake followers do not interact with your content as real ones do. Any future plans you have for influencer marketing or other co-marketing partnerships will be affected by this. 

Real Users Won’t Want to Follow You

Real users won’t want to follow you for the same reasons that influencers or brands won’t want to work with you. If you have a significant number of followers but are only getting a few likes on each post, they will notice that something is amiss. Even if the fake followers leave simple comments, real users see this as spammy. They may think your business is also fake or a scam. The last thing you want to do is destroy trust with your potential customers.

What You Should Do Instead

If you’re really interested in increasing your follower count, there are some safer alternatives you can do instead of buying followers.

Host a Giveaway

Hosting a giveaway is one of the best methods for increasing your follower count. Encourage people to share your post on their stories and/or tag their friends in the comments for additional entries. This gets your post and your profile in front of a lot more people than it would otherwise.

Invest in Ads

Spend your money on ads, not followers! It doesn’t have to take a lot of money to see results from Instagram advertising. This tactic will increase your reach and allow you to specify your target audience, ensuring your account gets shown to the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. 

Focus on Making Amazing Content

Real people will want to follow your Instagram account if you are sharing valuable content. This means sharing more than just promotional content. Rather than having all of your posts encourage users to buy something from you, think about adding some informational or entertaining content. For example, share tips and tricks related to your product or service. Or, you could create memes that relate to your industry. The better your content is, the more likely people will be to follow your account.

Build Relationships

You might want to spend your time connecting with your existing followers before focusing too much energy on finding new ones. You can do this by responding to comments or direct messages. Word of mouth is still a very important marketing tool, even when it comes to social media marketing. If you continue to treat your current followers well, they will be encouraged to tell their friends and family about you.

Don’t Buy Instagram Followers

As you can see, purchasing Instagram followers may seem attractive in the moment, but will only hurt you in the long run. Instagram, your partners, and prospective customers will all be able to see through your efforts to get fake followers. It will be a much better use of your time to host a giveaway, invest in social media advertising, and make amazing content if you’d like to see an increase in followers. If you’d like help with your Instagram advertising or your organic Instagram posts, 98 Buck Social is here to help. We have over 7 years of experience helping small businesses improve their social media presence and would love for yours to be next!

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Have any questions?

We have answers.

We partner with Socialboost to help build Instagram followers. Click the link below to enroll. Plans start at $59/mo.

Socialboost

By default, we can use the photos you have on your website as well as utilizing the plethora of photos available to us within our royalty free library.

If you have photos or videos for us to use, depending on your subscription, we welcome you to upload them into a Google Drive folder and share that link with us!

Looking for custom videos?  Some of our plans include videos or you can add them to any plan starting at $98/mo!

As mentioned above, depending on your plan, we can use whatever you’d like to provide us! If not, we’ll resort to using your website or our royalty free library.

That being said, we can come up with custom graphics that suit your branding style as an add-on to your posting subscription.

$98/month for 3 custom graphics each week
$148/month for 5 custom graphics each week

Note: The cost of custom graphics is on top of your monthly subscription cost

Content review and approval is where your social media content creator sends you a weeks worth of posts, prior to their designated publication time the following week.

This way, you will have the chance to give us feedback on each post in case you’d like us to make a minor edit.

Note: One round of editing per post permitted, depending on your plan.

The idea behind consistent posting onto your social media pages is to keep them active with content that promotes your business solutions, educates your audience to showcase your expertise and to also keep things lighthearted, it’s social media after all!

There’s nothing worse for a business than to earn someone looking into what you do, only for them to see a barren social media page. To them, it may appear that you are out of business or potentially a scam.

We are often asked about growing followers and generating sales or leads. These are great goals to have but please understand that those goals are better obtained through paid advertising campaigns.

For more information on paid advertising, please visit our paid advertising services.

We are fortunate to be partnered with CloudCampaign.com to utilize their excellent scheduling platform.

By signing up for our content services, we will set you up with your own Cloud Campaign workspace depending on your plan.

During onboarding we request admin access to your social accounts using a secure platform. This allows us to manage the occasional disconnect when the platforms push out updates.

Furthermore, with your own workspace you are welcome to view and edit content at your leisure!

We use Cloud Campaign, which is a 3rd party app, to scale social media management and posting. When a post says “Posted by Cloud Campaign”, it is only the admins of your company page that can see this and not your followers.