Gone are the days where we used conventional paper marketing in promoting our business. Now, people are opting to promote their business through digital means such as social media, advertisements, and other platforms. And as a matter of fact, the use of social media is more effective than ever.
One of the most in demand and widely used social platforms is Instagram, a visual-first and media sharing platform. Instagram has come a long way and has evolved throughout the time. What once started as a mobile check-in app, is now a photo and video sharing social networking service. It is said to be popular and only second to Facebook, and surely its rank is not for show as almost everyone, be it your friends, distant aunts, grandparents, neighbors, and even their pets, are on it. As this platform hosts millions of users everyday, it is a perfect channel especially for businesses to connect to an enormous number of audiences, raise the brand visibility, and boost sales.
Marketing teams greatly consider using instagram as it has substantial potential for selling acceleration opportunities. Not only does it have easy access to a vast number of interactive audiences, it can be used to strengthen your brand reputation, maintain an active customer engagement,and other growth opportunities. There are several ways to project your business on this platform and one of its marketing strategies is buying instagram followers. Yet, serious discussion has arisen, whether it is doing more harm than good. In this article, we will look into why buying instagram followers is not a good marketing strategy.
Table of Contents
Your account may be suspended
Building your presence is never a walk-in-the-park. You need to go through an arduous time of creating quality content and promoting it in every chance you get to increase your followers. As they say, higher followers, higher chance of business visibility- but it may not be an easy task. And this where buying followers proves to be an easy way out. With just a few bucks, you will instantly acquire thousands of followers that will surely increase your vanity metrics. You will no longer have to spend grueling hours wooing potential customers to like and follow your page as the number present in your every post will surely do the trick. However, most of these accounts are bots or inactive accounts that will not give you any gains for your business. Gaining a huge boost in your followers does not guarantee you an authentic engagement and thus your page will not have organic traffic nor show up in explore pages. New updates have made Instagram to be able to identify ghost accounts and purge them regularly. As they will be able to identify the bots in your followers, your account will rapidly lose your numbers and be temporarily disabled. And if worst comes to worst, your hard earned account will be suspended entirely
No engagement
As instagram bots are inauthentic, the engagement happening in your feed is essentially hidden from everyone and is not considered an engagement at all. These dummy accounts may like and comment on your posts at first, but later on it will fade eventually as there are no real people who will talk about your brand and post in their accounts – as they do not exist in real life in the first place. You have just spent your money on a fleeting interaction that may risk your accounts authenticity.
The artificiality is easy to spot
Dummy accounts and bots are easy to spot, especially for eagle-eyed followers. Dummy accounts serve their initial purpose of following and providing an early engagement in your feeds – but as a stand alone account, it has no reason to create contents and purchase the goods you advertise. Most of them will be inactive and go dormant in their own account without posting anything for a long time and just fulfill their purpose of giving likes to your posts. Not only is your follower population inflated, it does not bring you any organic and value-added interaction that you need. This will become a dead give away to others that something is up with your account and realize that most of your followers are artificially made.
Lose your credibility
No business wants their brand to be labeled as fake and inauthentic. As much as we strive to build a credible image, a ballooning followers without real engagement is just so sus. No users will want to follow an account with questionable reputation and needless to say, will not purchase your products. This will only make you look desperate and customers might think that your business profile is only doing good because of underhanded tricks and not because of your quality contents nor good feedback from real customers. This will only make your potential customers turned-off and dismayed with your fakeness.
