We’ve all been there: you’re building up your company’s social media accounts, and it just seems to be going so slowly. You get a trickle here, a trickle there, but in the end the growth is not nearly what you’d hoped it would be. You look at the social media accounts of your competitors, of celebrities, even of your personal friends, and wonder why your numbers aren’t up where theirs are.
And then you see the ads: “buy thousands of Pinterest followers now!” Or Twitter. Or Facebook.
On the surface, it sounds tempting. Even if you’re already aware that few (if any) of these purchased follower accounts have real people behind them, you might think that there’s some benefit simply in having higher numbers. After all, if legitimate people visit your page and see that you have tens of thousands of followers instead of just dozens, they’ll be more likely to think you have something interesting to say, right?
Probably not. Even if you appear to have a lot of followers, most people visiting your social media profiles for the first time will make the decision to follow or not follow you based on the content they see on your page, and whether or not they feel that content has value to them. As with most things, by cheating and taking the easy way out you only end up cheating yourself.
The true value in followers is whether or not they are sharing your content with their own social circles, interacting with you in a relevant way, giving you feedback about your products and services, and of course buying things from you. Naturally, this only comes from building an organic following, not from buying followers. In addition, if you have tens of thousands of followers who aren’t interacting with you, your real followers will notice that, and may become suspicious about what you’ve done.
Building a useful following takes time, not money. Don’t forget the “social” in social media: start talking to people, engage with the communities that you’re a part of, and watch your following grow. Be patient – it doesn’t happen overnight, but the quality of followers you’ll get from doing it the old-fashioned way will certainly outweigh any temporary (and empty) excitement you might feel if you buy followers and watch your numbers go up without having done anything aside from shelling out the cash.
