5 Reasons Why You Should NOT Buy Followers Or Friends
Jul 13 2009 
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It seems as if you just can’t get any social media mojo without followers anymore. I don’t mean 20-50 followers either. People are anxious to hit 1k followers or Oprah numbers like 1 million on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It’s not impossible either. There are tons of recommendation, auto-follow, and spam tools that allow you to amass at least 50 followers an hour.
While some of these are great depending on your business, one of them is a huge no-no for companies: spam! When I say spam, I’m referring to the services that allow you to buy followers. There are tons of them on Twitter. These services usually require you to share their services with your audience, hence the spam categorization. Here’s why your business should keep away from such tools:
- It tells me you don’t mind bribing me or flooding my stream with crap. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind accepting money (isn’t that the point of some of this stuff?), but to get my attention and keep it on social networks, you’re going to need a lot more than money sweetheart.
- In lieu of reason #1, you won’t make any money. None of your followers are TRULY interested in what you have to say, let alone passionate about your services or products. They’re irrelevant and so are you. Where’s the revenue in that?!
- I’ll laugh at you and so will others. Because it shows you have no originality, creativity, REAL (read: genuine) marketing talent, and… you’re lazy as hell dude.
- You set a bad example for other companies and you make my job a lot harder. When clients suggest this method, I automatically wonder if they’re really interested in connecting with their customers or if they just want more money. Then they wonder why they aren’t seeing results, when others that took the sometimes longer, but highly successful path of organic growth are shooting through the roof.
- It will not help your chances of success for anything you plan to achieve via social networks and social media in the present nor the future. In fact, it may do irreparable damage to your brand’s image online. And we all know how bad those results can be. Dominos anyone?
What are your thoughts on buying followers? Who is it beneficial too? What are some other costs? What benefits do you see in buying followers?
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I think it's important to remember that you aren't just buying followers. By gaining a large number of followers it means you go up in rankings and so are more likely to be recommended through natural means, and those natural followers are worth far more to you than people you have paid to follow you.
Actual good content is far more likely to get a decent number of followers though, and people paying for followers are just jealous of the people who can write good content.
I wholeheartedly agree kaerast. And yes, good content is definitely one of the keys. I may follow up later today or tomorrow on the keys I've used to organically growing my followers.
What do you think? Would you be interested in reading, reflecting, and sharing such tips with myself and others?
Yeah, buying followers is akin to buying traffic. Say you sold cement mixers.
From where are you more likely to get a cement mixer sale?
A) The 1,000 people that came to your site when you bought exit traffic from a totally unrelated site? Or
B) The one person that found your site when they searched for “buy cement mixers”…
It's a no-brainer. Search engines aren't the old marker of interest of course, but I think this speaks to Corvida's point: A follower who doesn't have genuine interest in your stuff doesn't advance your goals any.
There's not much I can say on organically growing followers which hasn't already been said: good content, respond to your followers' questions, and remember twitter doesn't literally want to know what you are doing right now. I'd be interested in your tips though.
Bought followers are so fickle. Run a competition on Twitter and you will likely see a spike (if you have a good prize!), but as soon as the competition ends the majority disappear. I know because I have done it. A few may stick but it is not a true targetted audience.
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