Buying Followers on Facebook?

Competition on social media is increasing for businesses, and naturally, everyone wants to have more followers than their competitors. Therefore, it’s not surprising that many take a shortcut and choose to buy followers.

Having a large number of followers “looks good,” which strengthens your brand, right? What many people don’t know is that bought followers can actually do more harm than help.

How does buying followers work?

There are numerous websites that offer followers for Facebook. Often, they provide “guarantees” that these followers are authentic when, in reality, they are just bots. The new followers you receive usually have locked profiles, meaning you know nothing about them. Where are they from? What language do they speak? What are their interests? Most likely, you’ve gained a bunch of followers who have no genuine interest in your business or products, so what do you actually need them for?

Low engagement reduces credibility

Let’s say you’ve purchased 10,000 followers for your Facebook page. They like your page, but they never like, share, or comment on a single post. People are becoming increasingly aware that followers can be bought. Therefore, they are more critical and skeptical when they see a Facebook page with 10,000 followers but only 2 likes on the latest post. This way, you lose credibility with real followers.

Even in the eyes of Facebook, you lose credibility. Facebook has a system called EdgeRank, where they measure the engagement on your page and calculate how interesting your content is based on that. 2 likes from 10,000 followers will indicate to Facebook that what you’re posting is very uninteresting, making it harder for your posts to reach and spread organically.

Since 2015, Facebook has also invested significant time and resources in removing hundreds of thousands of fake and inactive accounts. Pages with many bought followers can thus lose all the followers they paid for. You also risk having your account completely removed from Facebook.

Skewed audience leads to poor advertising

Facebook is one of the best sources for gathering information about and understanding your target audience. By adding a bunch of bought followers, this data gets distorted, and you can no longer measure and gather statistics about your target audience.

This will cause problems every time you want to boost a post or promote your page via Facebook Ads. Facebook wants to reach people with similar profiles to those who already like your page to maximize your advertising efforts. With bought followers, Facebook Ads get a very skewed perception of your target audience, leading to poorer advertising results.

It all ends up in a mess

When you realize that your bought followers cause more trouble than they’re worth, you’re faced with a time-consuming project of cleaning up and deleting among your followers. Moreover, if your bought followers are bots and not real accounts, they’re just one click away from being able to spam your timeline all at once…

In conclusion: The number of followers isn’t everything

Many people today focus on the number of followers, both on social media and the daily website visitors. Instead, try to prioritize quality over quantity. By engaging, educating, and entertaining through your various channels, the number of followers will naturally increase, and with people who are genuinely interested!

Remember that social media marketing requires time and patience but is well worth it in the end!