Everyone starting the journey into social media world will inevitably meet some ads promising to provide huge following base for like $5 and ask oneself – should I buy followers? Offers of some great amount of followers for some miserable sum will often seem attractive. We all heard ‘the money is in the list’, right? And the large fan base is the social media equivalent of the emailing list, isn’t it?

Yes, large fan base will most likely bring you great sales, but there is huge difference in what a real fan base is and the ‘purchased’ one.

For this we need to delve into how this industry of followers-for-sale or likes-for-sale is working.

How industry of buying likes/followers work

In fact such sellers usually have a huge base of people working for them, remotely of course, via their PCs or smartphones. They’re sent (automatically) the tasks like ‘you need to follow this page’ or ‘you need to click ‘like’ on this post’. And they do, and they receive some small amount of money for doing this. See where I’m heading? They would never buy from you! And that’s the whole point of amassing a fan base. If nobody’s buying, then why?

The people who work for such agencies are most likely not even from your country! They reside in some remote poor countries where even $10 addition to their monthly income is some serious money. They complete such tasks by thousands, and yes, they get paid some miserable cents for their each task. They have to complete them a ton to make it worthwhile. They would never remember you brand, not going to come again and browse your page, and of course would never buy.

Now let’s compare this to the real fan base. And to understand that – let’s see how it is normally acquired.

What is the ‘normal’ customer journey in social networks

Normally you receive followers from your advertising on social networks, something like saying ‘have a X problem? Read useful articles here’ – that’s a very simplistic way to describe it. You may also get followers from your current customers or visitors to your site, but you also have to advertise to them something like ‘stay in touch with us’ or ‘read more on the topic X, like our page’ etc.

The big difference is that such fan base are the people who are genuinely interested in what you’re doing. They might have seen an interesting article by you in the web search, they clicked on it, got to your website/blog, read more, probably still didn’t buy. Then they see your ad inviting them to like your page to receive update or new articles on the topic they already are interested in. They might become your followers. Then, with time, by reading more of your articles in their feeds, overtime they might realize you’re the expert in your field. They also might believe you have the solution for their problem, so they buy from you. They become your customers and also may be learning about your new features or offers from your social page and might buy more.

That’s how it works in general. And in that kind of mechanics there is no place for purchased fans. Ok, someone from Bangladesh just followed your company, for the sake of being paid like $0,01 to do that. So what? Will this person ever buy from you? No way. It may even be a person from US who is very desperate for money and resorted to such activity just to earn ‘something’. Is this person your potential customer? Well, only if you really are offering something for people in dire financial situations.

Other risks of buying likes or followers

Some social networks, Instagram especially, are very nervous about such activities and may block your account.

Having huge following from some strange countries might hurt your image as some of your potential customers may study your social pages and find out. They’ll be quickly coming to the conclusion that ‘this business suck so much they even had to buy followers’.

So, next time you’re asking yourself – should I buy followers – please don’t do that. It is not easy but fairly attainable task to grow your followers base by ‘normal’, official, allowed methods. This will be covered in further articles on our blog, so please follow us  so that you will see our articles from time to time.