The Real Cost of Buying Followers (And How To Fix It)

17 Feb The Real Cost of Buying Followers (And How To Fix It)

Social media marketing isn’t a simple game of likes and followers if you plan on being taken seriously as a business, build relationships with your customers, generate more leads and see real results. There are tons of websites offering thousands of followers for a low cost, but high numbers in following mean nothing if your audience isn’t engaged with you. Buying social media followers will hurt your brand more than the illusion of popularity you think you are creating.

I will admit that going on a business’ social media channels and seeing a BIG follower number is impressive at first glance. Your social media channels are a first line of contact between your customers and your brand – but who uses brands they don’t take seriously or trust? Besides creating a horrible first impression, the smoke and mirrors are a waste if you aren’t getting your audience to actually interact with your posts.

WHAT BUYING FAKE FOLLOWERS COSTS YOU:

Credibility

Not only will savvy professionals know what you’re up to, but consumers are getting savvier as to what adds up to an account with a purchased following. At a time where being transparent is so important, your potential audience will turn away for this insult to their intelligence. Buying your followers will cost your credibility.

Interaction

Buying your followers will cost you your audience’s interaction. When you talk to a bunch of fake or inactive users guess what happens? Nothing. Your posts get no likes, or comments, and if they do it’s mostly spam. How awful does it look to have 100,000 fans and 2 likes on a post? Ouch.

Reach

Since your newly bought following hardly interacts with you, your posts will have 0 reach. What’s the point in that? Why waste your time creating content that will not go anywhere past your fan page?

Metrics

A slew of purchased followers will absolutely muddy your metrics. Although if you are spending money on your audience (in this way) then maybe metrics don’t matter to you- but they do to any serious marketer, who wants results. With reach affected by the bought members, any trace of a real audience behavior is clouded.

Customers and business

Without an organic audience to spread your content, no new eyes will see your brand, and no one will click on any links you put out there, so again what is the point of all this?

Getting marked as spam

Yes, any trace organic following may not ever see your posts because the way the algorithms are set up, your channel is spam, attracting more spam and could cost your channel being removed permanently…another ouch.

All the listed above leads to a big waste of time, energy, and money. Bottom line, if you are on social media to cultivate an audience, get traffic and results stay away from buying followers. If you did buy followers, don’t wonder why your messages aren’t getting shared, or your links get no clicks. If your accounts do get deleted for being spam- consider it a blessing in disguise as you can begin to build an organic audience the right way.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’VE ALREADY BOUGHT FAKE FOLLOWERS

Flushing fake followers is one of the most frustrating and time consuming processes. Most of the time it’s easier to just start over. If you can’t there are ways to bring out real followers, or attract new ones. There are many third party tools to help you identify and get rid of followers. Here are some more organic methods to help you bring out any real followers and attract new ones:

Stick to your content schedule:

Keep putting out quality, brand related content on a regular schedule. Remain consistent and share quality content that will resonate with potential followers who will actually be interested in your brand or business.

Use relevant hashtags:

Attract the right followers by using hashtags that are relevant to your content and brand. Learn how to find hashtags that will work for your business here: How to Find the Right Hashtags for Your Brand or Business

Try influencer marketing

Influencer marketing can be a great way to expose your business to a relevant audience. Concentrate your efforts on getting the attention of one person or specific key players to help you build buzz and awareness about your brand, product or service. Working with influencers can be cost effective, and will help build organic brand awareness through simple campaigns like product demo’s and account takeovers. To learn more about influencer marketing, how to find the right influencers and get some campaign ideas read: How to Win With Influencer Marketing.

Social Ads

Okay, so the last thing you may want to do is dump more money into channels you’ve bought followers for, but social ads can help you reach the right customers. Social media ads offer really, really specific targeting. LinkedIn allows you to target specific groups, Twitter lets you target the followers of specific accounts and multiple hashtags, Facebook has the option to show your like campaign to friends of the people who already like your page. More recently, Facebook and Twitter have included custom audiences – using your list to target your customers and then serve your ads to other people who mirror your list. Creepy, but effective.On Facebook you can try using the audience restriction functions to define who you’re reaching

Preferred Audience by Post:

The preferred audience option allows Facebook to show your content to those who have expressed interests in line with interests you choose for each individual post. You can choose up to 16 interests. This will not limit reach, and should help your content get in front of audience members who will be interested in your content.

Pages with over 5,000 likes will have Preferred Audience turn on automatically. For the rest, you’ll have to dive into your settings to get the feature. In you Facebook fan page settings area. Look for “Audience Optimization for Posts” and tick the check box. Click “save changes” and you’ll be ready to roll.

Look for the little target circle under the area where you write the text for your post. From there a lightbox will pop up where you can choose targeting criteria. Facebook will help you with general ideas, but you can get creative and target publications, other pages, relevant companies etc.

Choose your interests click save. Now you can publish or schedule your post.

Page Preferred Audience: Just like post preferred audience, you can choose a preferred audience for your page. Again, head to your settings, but click on “Preferred Page Audience” on the left. You’ll be able to choose your target audience’s interests so your page is more likely not be shown to those who care about the subject you are posting about.

A fun extra with preferred audiences – You’ll be able to see in your page insights which posts you selected a preferred audience for. You can then compare and see which posts drive more engagement and reach. Remember to experiment with interest tags to gauge which ones work best for your business.  Your posts with preferred targeting will have a different icon under “Targeting” column in post insights.

Clicking to get further insights will show a “Preferred Audience” insights tab so you can see how your targeting did.

I took this screenshot right after I put my post up, but your post will needs least 100 views before you can see the Preferred Audience insights.

Once you can see insights they’ll look something like this:

Image via Social Media Examiner

Use Audience Restrictions

Unlike Preferred Page Audience, Audience Restrictions will only show posts to people that fit the criteria and interests you choose. This works well for when you have location specific promotions and you don’t want to bother the rest of your audience. This option shows your post only to those accounts that fall under restrictions you’ve set for each post. Narrowing your audience down even more may feel a little counter intuitive, but hyper segmentation allows you to create very specific content to appeal to individual sets within your audience. This option came in super handy when I worked on experiential marketing campaigns which involved samplings in different regions across the U.S. We used post targeting to let followers in specific regions know where sampling would be happening without disturbing the larger audience.

You’ll find Audience Restrictions by clicking on the same little target button you do to choose the Preferred Audience, instead this time you’ll look under the “Audience Restriction” tab. Here you’ll be able to restrict who sees your post by age, location, and language.

No good ever comes to people who pretend to be what they are not, and faking it till you make it clearly doesn’t work either. Apply this train of thought whenever paying $5.00 for 10,000 followers becomes tempting. Building an organic audience is hard work, but worth it when you start seeing your audience interact, drive traffic and build real leads.

<3 DhariLo