There is a strong temptation to bolster your Twitter followers or Facebook Page likes by ‘buying’ those followers or likes. It’s easy to do—sites like Fiverr have plenty of people willing to set you up with thousands of followers or likes for the low, low sum of just a five-spot. (Check out the video below who does it)
So should you pay to have someone booster your follower numbers on social media? I’ve certainly done it before when I first started to get active on social media. I hated the fact that I was stuck at the initial limit of people I could follow created by Twitter to control spam. And in my case it helped. Buying enough followers to pass that threshold meant that I could follow many more people and grow my social media account without have to wait for others to follow me.
There is an obvious advantage in having a lot of people following you. Those numbers can help with the Bandwagon Effect, as more and more people will think, “Hey, this page or Twitterer is really popular, so I should jump in and follow them also.” However, in the long run these ‘fake’ followers are doing nothing in terms of traffic, sharing your posts or contributing any value to your social media efforts.
And now it’s getting easier to spot accounts that have mostly fake followers and having mainly fake accounts following you might even result in penalty or having your account banned in the near future, if social media networks decide to update their policies and clean up spammy accounts from their networks.
Furthermore if you are caught and called out, your reputation can be killed and you can find yourself losing followers fast. So as a general rule I would say you should stay away from buying followers. It’s always better to choose quality over quantity when it comes to followers.
Much better option is to grow your numbers organically by sharing interesting content, posting regularly, connecting to leaders and influencers in your niche or industry and just by being active and keeping up with all the latest happenings on each network you’re on.
It’s interesting to note that many famous people have been caught buying followers to boost their ego and to show off how popular they are online. Below is the video that explores this phenomena.
(source: WhoIsHostingThis)
