With more and more emphasis put on having a successful social aspect of your business a new trend is setting in. This trend is paying for thousands of social network likes and followers. While it can be frustrating seeing only a few likes on your Facebook page. I want to tell you why paying for followers and likes is a bad idea.
These reasons come from personal experience. I have paid for Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers. My networks were eventually banned and it ruined my social reach entirely.
4 Reasons Why Paying For Likes and Followers is A Bad Idea
- If you buy followers you jeopardize your real customers seeing your posts. Especially on Facebook they use an engagement formula to rank post and see what post will show on news feeds. If you have paid for 30,000 likes and have no engagement in your post, Facebook will look at the content as not important and it won’t show up to the likes you actually generated with interested customers.
- The name of the game is engagement if you don’t have engagement on your post your just spamming your followers with links to your site. The truth is when you pay for followers or likes you aren’t paying for them to engage in your content. In my personal experience I had over 15,000 followers and showed no gain from this because none of them were engaging in my content.
- You loose sense of your target audience and who will actually buy from you. Once again these paid followers are not interested in buying or engaging in your content. They will never buy from you, EVER! The point of having a business network is to stay in contact with people who are interested in your business and would be interested in buying from you. Paying for followers will not lead to more sales!
- Chances are your social networks will eventually be reported as spam and shut down. When you pay for followers or likes these usually are fake accounts. If a social network sees that you have tons of followers that are fake (spam accounts) you will be considered spam as well. They can shut down your profile at anytime and I have had this happen to me. All the legit followers I obtained were all lost.
Take these tips as a warning from my personal experiences. If you buy followers and likes you will see no benefit from it, and you will most likely have your account banned. Put in the time to build your social networks the legit way and you will see engagement shoot through the roof.
If you have had an experience with paying for followers or likes I would love to hear about it. Leave a comment below with your story!
A few years ago I had a friend who sold mailing lists for business, home, gardening etc. THEY were real people actually looking for whatever you were selling. Today is a different world.
Before I joined WA, I had a blogger website about greeting cards. I still have it but haven’t created a blog in about 2 1/2 months. I purchased a list from a Fiverr member who would send 5,000 real people to your website for $5.00. When I went to blog on my website a few days later, I found I had 5,000 visitors that day!!!!! Did at least ONE of those people sign up with my card company? Heck No!!!
I have tried $10 Solo Ads a couple of times. I have not received any customers from the ones they sent to my website. I did not spend a large amount of money, but I learned something. “There are people who get paid to enter a website they have been directed to, but they only needed to spend a second or two.”
The little website I have on blogger still gets 2 or 3 people a day even though I haven’t blogged since the first part of October. No buyers however.
Best wishes to you for a very Happy New Year!
Thank you for sharing your story! You are one of many that have made the mistake. Hope all is well and have a Happy New Year too!
I spent around $30 on boosting posts and my site, apart from the large numbers of people supposedly reached I actually have gained no more followers or engagement. My likes have been at the same figure for approx two weeks? It’s frustrating as my personal facebookers from my hometown are very skeptical and disappointedly have not liked or engaged. I need a different strategy?
David,
That is unfortunate that they have not showed interest in your content. Maybe it is just not for them. Keep at it and eventually people who are interested will find your profiles. Also maybe you should give an incentive to the people that like your page. It could help with getting local people to start engaging.
I know someone in my community that posted that they usually donate $50 to a local charity, but if 200 people like our business page we will donate $250. This worked out well for him because the charity is very popular in our community, it also helped to get people to engage, and people like to hear your donating. Maybe something to think about.
Hope this helps!
Back in the day, this was a method used to provide “social proof”, or give the illusion that your social pages were popular. There are two main reasons why this method is frowned upon today. One, its sole purpose is to manipulate your search engine rankings, or more specifically, to beat Google. Two is the quality of the likes. They come from people who have no interest in your niche, thus will never visit your page, nor follow your links, nor buy anything from you.
That’s why paying for likes is an ultimate waste of time.
Thank you for the comment and knowledge. I agree that the reason people do it is to make it look like their page is popular, but like you said now all it does is hurt you!
Thanks again!
Thanks for sharing this information. I had considered buying followers myself at one point but my gut was telling me no. Glad I listened to it and you’ve posted this…it confirmed what I knew inside.
Glad I could help! Good thing you didn’t make the same mistakes I did!
Thank you so much for this post! Buying followers was suggested to me. It didn’t make sense to me and now I know why.
Aviva,
I’m glad I helped explain why it is a bad idea and great to hear you didn’t take the bait and buy follower!
Brok