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Buy Social Followers and Damage Your Online Business!

social mediaThe only reason you would want to buy social media followers is to make yourself look more popular that you really are. Social media can be a very powerful tool to help grow your brand and to engage with your audience. The main point here being that you want to engage with your audience.

I’m sure you have all seen the ads doing the rounds for buying social media followers? They all say that the followers are “real” people. This is just not possible, these are not real people they are bots and even the few that are real are certainly not interested in your business. These are people working from home making pocket money following people that they don’t care about!




Buy Social Media Followers and Damage your Online Business!

What you want for your business are real people, that follow you because they have come across your business online and they really want to follow you.

Social Media can be one of the best ways to share all your content with your audience.

So lets have a look at what this really does to your online business and why you should not buy social followers.

  • Fake Followers do not engage with you!

If someone has a huge amount of followers but no engagement it will reflect badly on you. You will have no influence online. The whole point of social media is to engage.

  • If you buy social followers your accounts could be deleted or banned!

Twitter does not allow fake followers, if they catch up with you your account could be deleted or banned. Google (that owns Youtube) might start charge you with fraud!

  • Fake followers pose a threat to your real followers

Fake profiles often are involved in scams which involved gaining usernames and passwords to accounts. This could mean an inconvenience of accounts being hacked, or potentially money and credit card fraud.

  • People start following fake accounts

Many people and businesses follow back anyone that follows them. This will lead to lots of people following fake profiles. Remember there is a often a limit to the amount of accounts you can follow, if you are following fake profiles you are limiting the amount of real accounts you could be following.

  • When you buy social followers very often they disappear just as fast

You might think it looks good when you jump from 100 to 10 000 followers in a day, but you won’t be so impressed when you drop from 10 000 to 10 in a day. This will happen, even if you are promised real and permanent followers.

  • It is easy for anyone to check how many fake followers you have

There are a number of free tools online to check how many social followers are fake. If you are not worried about the above risks maybe realise that if your real followers check on you they will lose your trust!

buy social media followersHowever not everyone that has fake followers has bought them! Check out this post by Ryan that was Bot Bombed! He also mentions some tools to help you get rid of fake followers.

Before you feel the urge to go off and purchase fake followers just bear in mind that what really counts is engagement. If you have 100 followers that engage with you it really is better than having 10 000 followers and no engagement.

Don’t go on an ego trip and buy social followers, it is not worth it in the end. Rather build up your social network slowly and properly.

What do you think about buying social media followers? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Are you tired of scams and time wasting websites? Do you want to make real, honest money online?

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Lynne

Mommy to a pigeon pair, blogger and online marketer. Lover of chocolate, good books and buckets of coffee.

52 Comments

  1. Hey this makes a lot of sense!
    I didn’t know there were offers out there for buying social following, but it sounds like a bad business prospect all in all. Thanks for the information. Do you have any suggestions in making your social media effective at a slow pace?

    • Hi Sheena. I’m surprised you haven’t seen any ads for buying followers! I would recommend building your followers by firstly sending out engaging content. Then when your audience responds chat back. Let them know that it us not a one sided relationship. It is quite simple, just think of to like a conversation. You are trying to get people to interact, so when they do interact back. Yes it will be slower but it is real.

      • As a newbie web builder I really appreciated the links to some nice looking free pictures. I bookmarked 2 of your suggestions. I’ll be back to look at more of your content.

        • Thanks for stopping in Ala and I am so glad I could help you with some tips on getting free images for your website!

  2. Hi Lynne,

    This is true with anything we do in our life, we have to work hard, gain authority and then teach others how to reach there, but if start using fake shortcuts from the beginning we oursellf will not reach anywhere, forget about showing it to others. People buy fake followers and they display it everywhere to gain importance but in long term that destroys the business and is a disaster.

    Thanks for sharing good content
    Kunal

    • Hi Kunal

      Thanks for stopping in again, yes you are so right. It takes time to build trust and credibility. To start that off on the wrong foot is not wise!

      Kind Regards

      Lyunne

  3. Buying followers is unethical. I believe that any unethical business practices cannot hold out in the long term. If people want to be truly successful they will have to do it the slow and “hard work” way to gain real followers. In the long run this will work best and the real people might actually buy from your site if you have gained their trust.

    It is important to make people aware of this. Well done on exposing the unethical practices out there and providing tools to help people keep their side clean.

    • Hi Lesley

      I agree 100% with you, anything unethical is a big no from me. You might think buying followers makes you look good, but it does the exact opposite!

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  4. Hi there,

    You’ve got your head on right 🙂

    It is indeed better to have 100 followers with which you have interactions, then 100000 fake followers which just sit their until they disappear again.
    I never thought about the fact that it can be harmful for your actual followers. That’s new for me but now you’ve said it it sounds very logical 🙂
    Thanks for that information!
    I guess the trick is build your follow up slowly but steadily. It will take a lot longer but in the end you’ll pick the fruits from your efforts.

    Cheers and thanks for the interesting post!

    • Hi Maarten

      Glad you enjoyed the post and learned something new 🙂

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  5. I agree with you. I’ve tried to get some page likes at Facebook and ended with few thousands of inactive users who aren’t engaging my posts. My page has 4000+ likes but my posts are getting 150- views and mostly due to irrelevance.
    So, I would say focusing on writing good content which will engage people is much better and money saver 🙂

    • Hi Mahmood

      Sorry you had to experience that. One of my websites has quite a successful Facebook page with close on 40 000 followers and the interaction is quite good. I have done quite a bit of Facebook advertising to get to this level but is has paid off. My fans are interested in the content and get involved which is exactly what I am looking for. If you are going to pay anything when it comes to social media rather promote via that website and get relevant (and real) followers that will engage.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  6. Hello Lynne. My name is John and I am currently a member of wealthy affiliate and I have to say, I agree with you 100% . Its the bomb. I am learning a lot here. Anyways this is about you. I really enjoyed reading your materials. I like the fonts you picked along with your content is just awsome! I didn’t know anything about fake followers but now thanks to you, I will be on the lookout. I like your honesty and will be re visiting your site. thank you for your time. John of Nutritional Needs for Kids.

    • Hi John

      Thanks for the compliments and the feedback.

      Enjoy your journey and best of luck with your site.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  7. Anyone who would buy social media followers is not only wasting their money but they are probably killing their chances of getting any real benefit from social media marketing. Marketing is about building relationships and trust.

    Being a “click happy” follower buyer or following everyone and anyone for the sake of gaining followers completely defeats the purpose.

    Building your following slowly and selectively is a much more effective method. Following a bunch of people who just collect followers is never going to your posts read.

    They are too busy spamming the massive following they built. Social media should be used to create a dialogue. It’s not a contest where he or she who spams the most wins.

    • Hi Steve

      Thank you for your feedback. I agree with you 100%!

      It is sad that so many people buy social media followers and think it will benefit them.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  8. Very nice clean website. I agree that buying social media followers is wrong and could damage your business. It’s always nice to have those few quality followers that you connect with than thousands of fakes who are bad for business. I’ve also looked at other posts on your site and found them useful. I will definitely come back again. Thanks for the good information!

    • Hi Ben

      I am glad you enjoyed reading my posts, thanks for visiting 🙂

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  9. My overall impression of this website is good. Actually better than good, because it was very informative. The theme layout is clean and very feminine and soft. Taylor made for a woman’s taste. The Wealthy Affiliate review was very informative and even visual with charts. I feel a chart or graph can say a lot more than a person can write, therefore saving time and resources. My only critical advice would be to double check for typo’s, because I know we all make them. The width of the page where you have the (Toluna survey site review) needs to be widened, because it’s cutting off parts of your sentences in your text… This was a good complete website.

    • Hi Ceed

      Thanks for the feedback, I’ll check for those typos and also the page width.

      I am glad you enjoyed my posts.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  10. Hey Lynne,

    With my first business this was suggested to me by my then business partner, I think it is a terrible idea, to buy followers, the smarter thing to do would to be to approach someone with a legitimate large following and ask them to promote your business to their following for a price, this strategy would work far better than purchasing fake profiles.

    I was unaware that there were tools that showed you fake profiles that were amongst your followers, this would be very handy as I get requests to be followed a lot of the time, majority of them are from my industry and are fan pages or business pages, but some are just random people who you never know could be trying to hack your passwords or anything.

    Aiden
    Freedom Weight Loss

    • Hi Aiden

      Yes I have also found that taking up an advertising offer with a successful company that has a good social following is a good way to grow your social networks. Also paid advertising with the social network works too, and the followers are relevant and active.

      Glad to provide you with a little more information the dangers of buying social followers!

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  11. I feel these sorts of social media deals will always come back to bite you in the behind! A lot of friends I have online have tried this route and they have gained followers…but only for a short while!

    Most of these new followers will stop following you after a while and some are not even real accounts – that can’t look good in the eyes of Google!

    • Hi Chris

      Yes I totally agree, in the long term I feel it would do nothing but damage your online business to buy social followers.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  12. Hi there

    Great post, lots to learn for people who buy fake social followers.
    What l have never understood is why people feel they need this, fake likes/follows do not engage, they do not read and do not care about your post.
    To me, buying or acquiring fake social likes or following is like lying to yourself, they do not benefit your business in any way whatsoever.
    Mostly new marketers do make the mistake of buying fake follows and likes,to me this is money better spent somewhere else.
    Thanks for a wonderful informative post.

    • Hi Roamy

      Thanks for your feedback. Like I said I think people are wanting an ego boost and to look good. That could be the only logical reason for it, but the truth is it will bite you if you do this. In the long run you won’t look good, you will just look silly when people realise there is nothing going on!

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  13. Dear Lynne,

    Wow, just wow! Mind blown, I had no idea about this. But, then again I am not much of a social butterfly with Social Networks yet since well there are idiots out there, lol. The kind of idiots that don’t have a care in the world but are just there to devastate people to make themselves look good. They in it to win the money and not help people, that is rude. Lack of character indeed. I abhor that.

    I for sure would never recommend anyone to use this Method to think by doing this, they would be more on Top of the World, no siree, we got enough of highly proud people, we need not no more.

    Wishing you all the best with your online success above and beyond the horizon,

    ~Angel

    • Hi Angel

      Thanks for sharing your opinion, I’m surprised you haven’t heard of buying social followers before. It is very common!

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  14. Great and easy to read. Thanks for the heads up. This area of social following is something that I have yet to rub up against so I’m glad I saw this. Very good, no nonsense advice. You do seem very knowledgeable so I hope it isn’t the case that you fell into a trap and have ended up speaking from experience?

    • Hi Nick

      Thanks for the feedback.

      I came across plenty of ads to buy followers but even then it made no sense to me to try and do that. I have since learned that it is a bad practice and dangerous. I have been approached by a lot of “online marketers” that have promised to increase my website traffic and to increase sales by promoting my businesses on their social networks.

      One of them claimed to have 400 000 Twitter followers, which he did but when I looked closer there was absolutely no interaction. When I queried this with him I never heard back! Sending out promotions to “400 000 followers” sounds great, but in reality you are sending tweets out into the middle of nowhere.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  15. Ah, a brilliant article. Twitter is an absolute nightmare for this, I have found. There are so many offers of followers, but as you say, what’s the point?!
    The number of followers you have is pretty irrelevant- it’s the engagement that matters. In reality, people don’t care how many followers you have- they care about whether or not you’re offering them something of value.
    Anyway, thanks for sharing.
    Chloe

    • Hi Chloe

      Thanks for your feedback. Yes I have seen so many Twitter accounts that have a huge amount of followers and no interaction at all. I believe a lot of the celebrities have bought Twitter followers which is quite amusing.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  16. Buying social followers never really intrigued me mostly because I find that a dumb way to waste your money. Fake followers are never good and I like it better when people follow me when I write something good or something they like. this was a great article and I am glas someone finally addressed this. Keep up the good work.

    • Hi Marc

      Hey you said it, it is a dumb thing to do! I am glad you enjoyed my article.

      Kind Regards

      Lynne

  17. Hey Lynne,
    great post. It’s a waste to just buy followers. I find no benefit in it. I want to know who actually wants to listen to me. Not somebody that just follows random people without knowing what they offered because they made some money doing it. I know a lot of people buy social followers from Fiverr and I would highly not doing that.

    • Hi Brandon, thanks for your feedback. I didn’t know you could buy social followers on Fiverr. I have only visited Fiverr a few times and not paid too much attention to what is offered there, I am planning on getting involved soon and doing a review on them so I will have a look at those services soon.

  18. Hi Lynne,

    I remember some time ago when I was on Twitter, someone or ‘some bot’ sent me a message that if I follow him or her, I would get like 5K followers a day. Out of curiosity, I played along but wasn’t hoping for much.

    When I checked Twitter profile after a few days, I found myself ‘sending’ massive similar Tweets, without my own knowledge. Now, it looks like I am scamming my followers. It’s weird – I don’t even know how these bots get into my profile.

    Oh well, lesson learned. No such thing as instant followers.

    • Oh my gosh Cathy, that must have been an awful experience! Who knows what your followers thought of that? Just goes to show what sort of things are going around.

  19. Hi Lynne, great article and I totally agree with you. Another way to easily check if a page has fake followers is to look at the likes & comments.

    For example:
    If a page has 10K likes, but only 6 likes and 2 comments, you can be sure they’ve bought their likes. The same with pages that have 500K likes and 70 likes and a few comments 🙂

    I see this all the time on facebook 🙂

    • Hi Jurgen, yes I also see that. Absolutely no interaction but masses of fans? Definitely a sign that something is not right.

  20. Hi Lynne, great advice. I came across some ads for buying Facebook fake followers earlier and did some research.
    For those who have a Facebook business page, the same advice goes – don’t buy fake followers no matter what. Even if you have a 10,000 strong fan base, your posts won’t show to the real followers if most of them are fake followers that show no engagement.
    Facebook’s edgerank system will filter your posts and even the real followers won’t see them in their feeds.
    It’s always better to build your business page slowly and legitimately.

    • Hi Edward, thanks for your feedback and adding that information. I didn’t know that if you have fake Facebook followers it can affect how many of your real followers see your posts.

      Another great reason to not buy any social followers!

  21. Yikes, I’ve seen many of these programs online. At seemd “good” at first, but faking a smile can only go for so long before people realize, the REAL people, that half of not the majority of your followers are fakes and bots. Then they’ll go around, and speak negatively about your site and therefore as you said, ruin your bussiness.

    • Hi Lakan Dula

      Yeah it is exactly like a fake smile! I am glad you enjoyed this post and found it useful.

  22. Hi Lynne
    I have just started a website. It is still young around 5months old.I am still new to the game but I have worked really hard at my site.

    The thing is that I have yet to see a sale and it demotivates me.And this brings me to your article subject.

    I was so close to buying social media followers.Out of desperation to at least see one sale.

    Thank heavens! You have convinced me otherwise.

    I really don’t want to see my Twitter account closed or having been shut down by Google.

    Thank you.I have shared your post on google plus and Twitter to inform other folks of the dangers of buying followers.

    All of the best to you.
    Roopesh

    • Hi Roopesh

      I am so glad to have helped you out, just remember that an online business takes time so yes you may not make a sale within the first 5 months. Keep loading up quality content that is written with SEO in mind and your content will rank. This is NOT a make money overnight business.

      With regards to buying followers.. there is no such thing as buying “real” followers! There is no way to make a sale from buying followers. Keep building your social networks, interact and create engagement. There is no other way to do it.

  23. You are hitting close to home with this one. I fell into this trap with a business that I started a few years back. I bought over 60,000, followers. Guess what those 60,000 followers have purchased from me, absolutely nothing. I quickly got discourage and all but abandoned the project. I will not do that again!

    • Hi William

      Thank you for sharing your personal experience with us and it just goes to prove the point, you are not getting real people! Buying social followers is pointless and can be damaging!

  24. Hey, I can understand it being very tempting to buy social followers when you first open a new page and there is that lonely zero or very slow rising numbers. Something I implemented a couple of times was running a competition on the page, with a facebook ad. Varying success but at least meant there were then some followers there. Buying fake followers is a complete waste of money and can certainly hurt your business rather than help it!

  25. Thanks for this informative post Lynne.

    You are definitely right when you say buying followers can only damage your business. What I can’t understand though, is why would anybody want fake followers in the first place, unless as you say, you are trying to make yourself look popular.

    I can think of far better ways to spend my money.

    • Hi Michel

      Yes it does seem pretty pointless doesn’t it? Thanks for sharing your opinion 🙂

Comments are closed.