If you are not aware, it is true that many brands, businesses and
individuals buy twitter and facebook followers to inflate their
followers count.
Does buying fans and followers on social media
sound unethical to you? Unethical or not, many small and large business
who don’t have the time, patience or inclination to gradually build up a
genuine following, are adapting this new trend of buying followers and
fans for their social media pages. Here are a few things you should
consider before you bulk buy for your social media.
Make a good impression
Have you noticed that you tend to "Like" something on Facebook more
promptly if it already has a following of 30,000 people and it ‘looks’
popular? And sometimes, until you know of the product, service of the
social media page personally, you’d generally be iffy on following a
page that has only a handful likes or a few followers, isn’t?
Many businesses consider buying Facebook or Twitter followers not
because that’s actually going to convert more lead for into sales them
in the future, but for setting up random visitors psychologically that
their page is popular, accepted and worth following.
More fans and followers but no interaction
You may end up buying fans and followers for increasing potential
sales in your business but you can you buy interaction too? It’s
extremely easy to recognize fake followers and fans if a visitor sees no interaction of your fans or followers with your brand.
There have been cases where paid fans and followers copy paste
multiple comments, wall posts or tweets for various businesses. This
becomes an immediate getaway to the fact that your popularity has been
paid for, which may harm your reputation considerably.
Top search results within Facebook and Twitter
We wonder if having more followers can push you up in the ranks of
search results in Google. But your chances of turning up in searches
made within Facebook and Twitter can decrease considerably if you have
more followers.
Again, it will also boil down to having good content on your Facebook
or Twitter page because even if you manage to route traffic to your
page by showing off popularity with large number of followers, you won’t
be able to hold the visitor for long if nothing interests him/her.
Risk for negativity
Do you know what kind of harm you risk for your brand by buying
followers for Facebook or Twitter? Imagine you woke up one morning to
find out that a follower has posted for fun "Hey guys, I am a paid follower. Is anyone else paid here?" or "Get a better offer for following XYZ".
This could not only mean a complete waste of money for the followers
you bought, but also a complete slur on the name of your brand. Your
genuine followers will feel betrayed and never trust you again. There
isn’t much potential for signing a contract with each individual
follower to post only positive comments right?
Buy the target audience you want
One big advantage of buying Facebook and Twitter following though, is
that businesses can select the range and profile of the type of fans
and followers they want. For instance, if you have a beauty product to
sell, you could specifically buy American women fans in the age group of
25-40 and so on (yes, there are services that give you that).
On the other hand, if you solely depend on building genuine traffic,
you would probably take a long time to build up a following of potential
customers and a target audience of the exact diversity and category
that you would hope for.
It may sound like we’re sitting on the fence here, but it’s really a matter of every business’ ethics
and policy to bulk buy followers on social media or not. Building
genuine fans and followers who can regularly interact with your brand
and actually consume your marketing communication sounds like a much
better idea to us.
What’s your opinion? Should social media followers be bought?
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