Why you should never buy Instagram followers, and how to grow your social media organically instead
The follower query: “to buy or not to buy”
As you may have noticed in your journey to having a well-rounded, well-liked, highly engaging social media strategy, there will always be the good old-fashioned hard-work driven strategies, and the shortcuts.
It seems straightforward to pay as little as ten dollars and see your follower count shoot up, gaining you that nifty swipe-up feature in your stories once you hit the big 10K Instagram followers, a metric that often gives brands that “I’ve made it” moment.
If you’re reading this and thinking “Yes! Buying followers works for me and my goals, I think I’ll give it a try,” then we won’t stand in your way. Check out sites like ViraLyft, GetViral.io, and SocialPackages.net to start and see if they work for you.
BUT! We greatly caution against this quick fix, and never use this strategy ourselves with our clients. We’ve laid out the top four reasons why we never, ever buy followers, and how we grow our pages organically instead.
An Army of Bots
The crux of fake followers - bots! Yes, they are generally all bots. Bots look real at first, they’ll have a fake (likely stolen) avatar, maybe even a quick bio, and the really fancy (read: expensive) bots will show posts and followers of their own. Often mass-produced, these bots just won’t have the normal look and feel of a true Instagram account. Some will have strange follower-to-following ratios, zero comments and likes on their posts, and absent captions.
Upon closer inspection, your real followers (and in most cases, potential customers!) can easily spot the fakes if they care to look through your followers list. Seriously, more people do this than you think when vetting a brand. Is that the impression that you want to leave on your potential customers? If you bought followers, what is there to stop them from thinking that you bought your positive reviews? How can they trust you at all?
Online integrity is important to potential customers, and something as simple as even thinking that you are being less-than truthful on your accounts can put a sour taste in anyone’s mouth.
2. The Engagement Issue
In the past, engagement used to be a “nice to have”, rather than a “must have” on Instagram. Who doesn’t love that immediate rush when you see a slew of “like” notifications after a post, followed by interesting and fun discourse in the comment section? But in 2016, that took a sudden shift when Instagram moved from a chronological feed to an algorithm based on engagement—effectively turning it into the true social currency.
Today, Instagram will show your initial post to a segmented section of your audience who is generally more engaged and interested in your page. If your post achieves high engagement with that small section, Instagram will show your post to another audience, and so on. Once the post gets to a non-engaged audience, the post will stop being shared on people’s feeds and explore pages and fade into the background of the endless scroll.
That’s the crux with bots— they do not engage. No likes, no comments. So say you have 9,000 bots following you, and 1,000 real followers. You effectively have an engagement ratio that is ten percent of what the app thinks it should be, and now their engagement algorithm stops your post from being shared with wider audiences immediately.
3. Sinking Performance Metrics
Speaking of that engagement ratio, all other metrics will tend to drop because of this. Engagement rate, which again, is the percent of likes, comments, shares, views, and saves per followers that your post receives will plummet. Impressions, which are the number of times your post is seen on any screen, mobile or desktop will fall, as bots don’t view your content. And finally, your total reach, which is the number of individuals who see your posts, will remain low, due to the points made in the above section.
No engagement, no shares, low metrics all around. Is it really worth a report full of plummeting metrics, just for those extra few thousand followers?
4. Beware of the Purge
Our last point to the folly of follower buying—it is simply against the rules of the app. And by no means are we the rule police, we understand the need to take certain measures and calculated risks to succeed, but only in the right circumstances.
Instagram is under no obligation to keep an account around that excessively breaks it’s terms of use. We rely on this service to promote our businesses, and we are not in a position to begin to challenge the beast that is Instagram. The app will frequently purge bot accounts that they know are bought, meaning that you could spend hundreds of dollars on followers only for them to disappear overnight. Additionally, there is nothing stopping the app from banning you if they determine that you have been violating their terms of service with purchased followers. In fact, according to Instagram Community guidelines, buying fake followers is officially banned and is considered fraudulent.
Bottom line, don’t risk your entire account just for a few more follows. You can get your account there on your own, with just a few of the following steps.
Engage, Engage, Engage
The aforementioned engagement-based algorithm works two ways on the app. You cannot just post on Instagram and wait for people to respond without giving something back to the community. Take an hour or two a day (it’s tedious, but worth it), to follow like-minded accounts and people on the app, like posts on your feed, save items to reference later, and join discourse in post comments, both on your own posts and others.
Instagram runs a community-based platform - you get out of it what you put into it. If you put in the hours each day to engage with others online, you will see a swift increase in followers.
2. Get to Know Your Audience
After spending some time on the app each day, learn about the communities in your immediate sphere and begin to map what they care about. How will they benefit from following you? What do they hope to gain by using your product or service? Why should they follow you rather than a competitor?
Exercises like this will help you streamline your content to be more personal to your audiences, and keep them coming back for more.
3. Understand Your Metrics
Now that your follower ratio isn’t skewing your metrics, you can use them to your advantage to understand and interpret social metrics. These metrics provide insights into your follower’s interests, wants, and feelings about your posts. For example, if you have a post that gets fewer likes than others but much more engagement than usual, you can conclude that you hit a nerve in a specific audience, giving them something to discuss about in the comments section. You may determine that the post was too niche for your wider audience, or opt to keep various niche posts to encourage such discourse from time to time. In your wider post calendar, you may set aside a post or two each month for such audience, while saving other posts for wider audiences.
Understanding your insights will give you the opportunity to make these decisions and test the various ways to keep an audience engaged to widen your reach and attract new followers. At Big Stretch, clients receive a full report each month with the insights pre-analyzed, and which we use to make decisions about future social media posts and strategy.
At the end of the day, buying followers will always be an option. Instagram will try to find workarounds, and bot sites will improve to override those. It is a short term solution to a problem, which may work if you are an influencer starting out or a brand that just wants to get off the ground. Ultimately, this decision can come back to haunt you, hurt your credibility, and cost you customers and money.
Growing a following organically is often looked at as the “hard” way, but when applying the correct strategy and using the tools given to you to your advantage, you’ll find that your followers, engagements, and customers will continue to grow exponentially.