“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it”
In today’s time every business is on social media because everyone wants to be popular and wants to have an impressive audience. With over 83 million fake accounts, it’s not an easy task to build the genuine audience but what’s worse is buying this audience base by buying followers and likes. When you see only handful of people engaging with your brand, you feel the temptation of spending some money and buying your audience.
Why build an audience when you can buy one? Right? But as enticing as it may sound, we give you 5 reasons why you should never pay to get social media likes or followers:
1. IT’S LIKE TALKING TO THE WALLS: Social media is a great place to generate engagement and awareness about your brand. When you buy followers or likes, you should know that you aren’t paying for valuable eyeballs or rather we should say real eyeballs. The majority of accounts that you get (paid) likes from are bunch of empty, fake profiles with no actual intention of engaging with you or purchasing anything from you.
2. IT HURTS BRAND INTEGRITY: When you buy likes, you get thousands of it overnight but when you get back to your page and check the response on the content you have shared then you don’t find anything more than 3-4 likes or no engagement at all. It devalues the brand integrity, hurts future efforts at creating the authentic content and threatens the meaningful online presence of the brand.
3. IT WASTES YOUR ADVERTISING BUDGET: Social Media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter among others are the great platform for starting a result oriented ad campaigns. The purpose of these campaigns is to increase the number of impressions and engagements on the content of your page. But, if you have bought your followers, which are more likely to be bots or dummy accounts then the money spent in the advertisement by your company has gone towards promoting your business to the people who actually don’t exist. In other words, you have wasted all of your money and got nothing in return.
4. IT PUTS A BIG QUESTION MARK ON YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS: When you set up a marketing campaign on social media platforms, you choose people on various demographics and when you buy followers they might come from every corner of the world and generally don’t fall under your target audience demography. When your company will demand the analysis report of your marketing campaign you will have nothing to show but a report full of depreciating graphs. Paying for likes makes it impossible to truly understand who your consumers are, hampering long term strategy and the ability to connect with authentically engaged users.
5. A LOT OF PLATFORMS FORBID IT: Most social media platforms have policies which forbid buying followers and might punish for doing the same. Just because you haven’t been caught yet, don’t assume you won’t be. Recently a lot of social media influencers who regularly buy followers and likes have reported being shadow-banned as a punishment.
Also published on Medium.
