Why buying social media followers is a bad idea

It is very difficult to overestimate the value of an engaged cadre of social media followers for your ebooks store. Necessary to the success of your endeavors, a passionate fan base gives you a ready audience to which you can market. Further, it establishes you as an influencer, which can result in an additional revenue stream for your business. With that said, there’s really only one way to build a solid and responsive following.

And, purchasing one ain’t it.

Here’s why buying social media followers is a bad idea.

They Won’t Engage

If you use a bot to create a large following by following people and being followed in return, or if you pay a service to generate a bunch of followers for your social feeds, you’ll absolutely wind up with huge numbers of followers. But when someone takes a look at the number of responses your posts generate, the figure will be abnormally low. Anyone sophisticated in such matters will be able to see through the ruse immediately. Let’s say your Instagram feed has 500,000 followers, but your posts are only garnering an average of 10 or 12 responses. You don’t need to be one of the world’s ten most intelligent people to see something is off there. So even with that huge number of followers, your words will disappear into the ether because fake followers don’t engage.

Sites Frown Upon the Practice

Facebook uses what it calls EDGERANK and all social sites have something similar. This is basically a score determined by the number of visits to your page, the volume of comments your posts generate, the number of likes generated and how often your posts are shared. When you buy followers, or create a bunch of fake followers, you’ll get a low EDGERANK score, which will lead Facebook to consider your page unimportant. This, in turn, will keep it buried in users’ feeds, as opposed to rising to the top.

Wasted Budget

Meanwhile, the money spent buying fake social media followers for you or your business (e.g. ebooks online stores) could have been put into a social media ad campaign, which has a better chance of creating leads and generating new followers. When you allocate assets to a particular purpose, your goal should be to further the cause of your endeavor. Fake social media followers are like empty calories. It feels good to know they’re there, but you derive no nourishment from them whatsoever.

Potential for Alienating Real People

There are times when people will come across your page by accident. Upon arrival, when they realize your topics are producing no discussions, or nothing else of interest is going on there, they will continue to scroll without interacting with your page any farther. This, in turn, will drive your EDGERANK score even lower because they also won’t like your page or share it, which further justifies the algorithm’s perceived irrelevance of your presence on the platform.

Ultimately, It’s Counterproductive

For all of the reasons stated above, buying social media followers is simply a bad idea. All of the benefits of having a large following are completely diminished when that following isn’t made up of real people. You won’t get the engagement you need, the sites will rank your pages poorly, you’ll spend good money to make all of this happen and you’ll jeopardize your opportunities to get users to identify with your brand and become loyal disciples.