Why you should stop buying fake followers on social media

Introduction?

Social media has come to stay. Many businesses around the world are beginning to see how important social media is in their marketing mix.

Unlike in the years before now, social media lets marketing become a two-way communication street, where businesses don't talk at their customers but talk with them. On the other hand, customers too, can respond in real time and give feedback.?

Unlike other traditional marketing channels, social media makes it very possible to measure analytics and see who exactly is interactly with your marketing communications and how they're doing so.?

Unfortunately, when it comes to social media marketing, many businesses are focusing on vanity metrics like “followers count”, “likes “, “comments” and “shares”. And because organic social media growth is a very long game, so many businesses are resulting to shortcuts like:

• Buying fake followers on their social media accounts OR
• Buying a social media account with a large following and rebranding it as theirs

These two shortcuts have proven to be very ineffective over time and don't result in any significant ROI for the businesses.?

Let me quickly give you some examples from my own personal experiences as a social media manager.

Case Study 1:

In November 2021, I was hired by a Canadian-based company as a content writer. The company was into Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT). They helped Fortune 500 companies with digital transformation and used AI/ML to automate repetitive tasks in their companies.

One of the challenges my company had was their marketing communications. They didn't know how to communicate the work they did to make sense to their ideal customers. My boss felt writing tons of SEO blog posts on his website was the best way they'd get discovered, eventhough they had little or no presence on social media.

Because he was the AI/ML Expert, and it was a very small business, his social media pages (LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter) were used instead of the company pages. I liked the idea! When I joined the business, he was paying a lot of money to a certain social media marketing agency in India. All they did was produce more and more content, but never really communicated the value he was offering to potential customers. He eventually fired them.

One month into my job as a “content writer”, I hated it. Although I've been writing for most of my life, I discovered writing 3-5 longass blogposts per week for this business wasn't fun at all, and I wanted to flex my creativity a little more. Some years back, I had a very active Facebook account and had grown a loyal following of over 3,500 community members. I had a feeling that I could do the same for him - I could write more content that communicated his value to potential clients on social media and attract our ideal customers.

After talking with my boss, he let me step into the big shoes. Because writing is my superpower, and the platform I had seen the most success on was a text-based platform (a.k.a., Facebook), I took charge of social media copywriting on his LinkedIn profile and cross-posted to Facebook. Suddenly, the page that seemed dead and stagnant started seeing more and more growth, and the followers began to grow too.

However, I noticed something very disturbing, despite having a high number of followers on his pages (most especially on LinkedIn), the engagement on the page was so poor. We were getting less than 20 reactions on an average post with a page of nearly 20K followers. I knew that something was wrong! Because, even as a small creator on Facebook, with less than 3,000 followers, most of my posts had over 200 reactions.?

This was my first official job as a social media manager, so, I couldn't actually pinpoint the fact that they bought followers! But, I asked a friend who worked as a social media manager with another company, and she told me my boss must have bought those followers. Maybe he did or maybe it was the Indian social media marketing agency that did (on his behalf).?

Beyond the fake followers, there were also from other gimmicks/shortcuts my boss tried to employ for his social media growth such as:

1. Engagement pods: He belonged to multiple groups on LinkedIn. So, once I made a post on his account, I had to drop links on the groups, then go on to like and comment on those other people's posts even though it was completely useless. Thinking about it now, maybe the less than 20 reactions we usually got from his posts actually came from these folks.
2. Engagement team: Anyone who has used LinkedIn knows how it prioritizes dropping valuable comments on other people's posts and how it makes your account more visible. My boss created an entire team of 3-4 people for this. Their job was to comment on 50 posts everyday. Not just one line comments, but long, robotic comments generated from Copy AI. On a daily basis, there are 150-200 comments from his account daily. This resulted in LinkedIn clamping down his account severally because they felt something was wrong, but he didn't relent.

By creating content that was relevant, interesting, timely and engaging, I organically:

1. Attracted more followers for my boss (across LinkedIn and Facebook)
2. Increased engagement rate across his pages
3. Attracted inbound leads for the business, who booked discovery calls with my boss and some resulted in paying customers

But no matter how hard I worked, the followers-to-engagement kept staggering between 1% and 3%.?

Case Study 2:

In May 2022, I was contacted by an entrepreneur who ran a chain of businesses. She had 3 online stores where she sold luxury hair, clothes & shoes, and jewelleries, respectively. She was an ex-beauty queen and had also started her own pageantry.?

You know that thing businesses do when they hire a social media manager and expect you to do everything? Yes, that was the story of my life. It was my responsibility to manage the Instagram & Facebook pages for her 3 online stores and pageantry brand. But her main focus was her pageantry brand.

For the first 2 weeks, I spent time optimizing her online stores' Instagram pages and ensured they were visually appealing. I created Instagram highlights and gave her feed a makeover. She was impressed.

Up next was her pageant brand. I noticed the page isn't brand new. It had a ton of content on it (although they looked like something that wasn't well thought about and planned). The Instagram page especially had a ton of followers too, but the engagement was very low. The few posts that had high engagement were unusually high.?

But then, I ignored it and started implementing my own social media strategy. I started creating interesting and very engaging contents, but all I got was crickets. Nobody liked the posts, nobody commented on them, nobody shared them. It seemed like I was posting to the void. Who then were those nearly 1,000 followers on the page?

After 2 weeks of doing this to no avail, I got frustrated. I decided to even check, who exactly are the followers on this Instagram that can't like to comment on anything I shared. There and then, I got the shock of my life! I saw all kinds of rubbish accounts as our followers (Traditionalists, Herbalists, People with no real names or identities, pages without a single post, pages with no bio, etc etc). These people were not in any way our ideal customers for the brand.?

I was very disheartened. I knew at that point that this was a dead end. The only way I could actually start seeing results from my client's Instagram page was through 2 ways:

1. Removing all the followers on that page and deleting all old posts OR
2. Starting a new page afresh

I talked with my client and she was very understanding. I took the second option and boy, did I start seeing results! By creating valuable content and using hashtag strategy, with less than 30 organic, real followers, our engagement was up, we got DMs and enquiries from people who were interested in signing up to our pageantry.?

Concerning the few posts on the old page that had unusually high reactions, I somehow found the Instagram page of the previous social media manager. Then, I discovered that most of the posts on her personal page were about buying fake followers and doing follow-for-follow. She wasn't only buying followers, she was buying likes too.

I wonder how exactly people like her claim to be a professional social media manager.?

Case Study 3:

In August 2022, I started working with another company. This one was a group of companies with 3 sub-brands and a client brand. Each of the brands had 4 social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter). Altogether, this company expected just me and my co social media manager to take charge of 20 social media accounts.?

At the time, I was still very nascent in my career and still very money-hungry. I wasn't aware of important questions to ask a business before accepting to work as their social media manager. Thankfully, that has changed today!

Before I accept any social media management job today (whether you're looking for an in-house manager or a freelancer), I ask the following very important questions:

1. Have you ever bought followers in the past?
2. Did you create your social media account from scratch or did you buy it?
3. How many social media accounts does your business have?
4. How many posts per week do you hope to see?
5. Are you aware that organic social media marketing is a long game and requires patience? Are you willing to be patient?
6. Are you aware that it takes 90-120 days for a social media marketing strategy to mature? Are you willing to make a commitment to pay for my 3-months social media management service upfront?
7. Are you aware that my job is not to give you followers or likes, but to build a strong online reputation for your brand on social media?
8. What social media goal do you want to achieve? Create brand awareness? Generate leads? Or make instant sales?
9. Do you have a monthly budget for running paid social media ads?

At the time, I never asked any of these questions and I just got in head straight and met with my Waterloo! I was responsible for conceptualizing and creating content for all 5 different brands. I was also in charge of posting across half of the accounts every day. My colleague was an agency owner, so in addition to our already difficult job, she was very busy too.?

After less than a month, we got called into a meeting by the Marketing Manager. She complained about how we were not getting any results from social media. Her major bone of contention was that we didn't have many followers. Then, during the meeting, our graphics designer brought up a suggestion: “What if we buy social media followers?” I instantly felt cold chills running down my spine.?

His argument was that people trusted pages with more followers than those with fewer. He claimed how in his previous job, they had a project and set up social media pages. They bought 5,000 followers each and started creating loads and loads of content to populate the page.

Luckily, my co social media manager and I have had past traumatic experiences with pages that have fake followers and knew how it all defeats the essence of social media management. We stood firmly against it. But a few days? after that meeting, we both got laid off.?

I don't know if they went on with the plan of buying the followers or not, but one thing I know today is that the company no longer exists. Maybe because they couldn't attract any customers or make sales.

Case Study 4:?

In October 2022, a startup contacted me for the role of a digital marketer. They were just starting out and needed someone with a good knowledge of digital marketing, that'd help them:

• Come up with strategies they'll implement across their various digital marketing channels?
• Set up their social media profiles professionally in a way that attracts potential clients
• Manage the day-to-day affairs of their social media pages, create content and engage with followers
• Create all marketing communications materials (eg. Fliers, Lead magnets and Proposals used for cold emailing).

This startup was very new and helped businesses build websites, apps and custom software. Our target audience were local brick-and-mortar businesses who were still unaware of their problems. Through our social media posts, we needed to show them why their business needed a digital home (that is, a website). As an incentive, we also promised to help them set up their Google My Business profile, as well as their social media profiles, if they paid for our website development and design services.?

Using this social media marketing strategy, here's what my results looked like:

1. I grew the social media community from 0 to 250+ followers in the first 60 days organically with a 5-15% engagement rate per post.
2. I saw a steady rise in the number of impressions, organic reach, page/profile visits, post engagements and click-through rates across all social channels.
3. I conducted weekly & monthly social media analytics and compiled reports which I shared with the rest of the team.
4. Using the data collected from my reports, I developed and managed a monthly social media content calendar that helped me post more consistently across all social channels.
5. I received 3-5 DMs weekly from prospects who were interested in our website development and design services, who I’d book a discovery call with our website design team.?

My boss was impressed. However, he still had the impression that more followers on the social media pages meant our social media marketing was doing well. He began saying things like he wanted us to go and buy followers to give the pages a boost while I kept creating great content. I had to handle that objection, and kill any thoughts of that from ever springing up again.

Putting it all together

I hope I have been able to convince you with the above case studies that buying fake followers does more harm than good to your business. And just in case you couldn't pick up my points, I'll say them again:?

• Buying fake followers makes your account lose credibility.?
• Fake followers offer zero engagement.
• It results in damaging the reputation of your business.
• Bought followers bring spam.
• It distorts your performance metrics.
• You stand a chance of account suspension/deletion.
• Your followers-to-engagement ratio is very low.?

In order to avoid all of these, this is what you should you do instead to ensure a high return-on-investment on your social media marketing efforts:

1. Be very clear on who your target audience are: Knowing your target audience will go a very long way in creating marketing communications that resonate with them. Knowing your target audience helps you know their problems, pain points and objections, and you start creating content that handles them.

1. Conduct an intensive competitive research: Find out what kind of content your competitors are creating across the different stages of their marketing funnel. Find out their mistakes, and develop ways of creating content that appeal to your target audience more.

1. While planning your social media content, always keep in mind the different stages of Awareness: There are 5 stages of Awareness; Unaware, Problem aware, Solution aware, Product aware, and Most aware. Always ensure there's content for people at these different stages in your monthly content calendar.?
2. Create different kinds of content: Some people prefer text content, others prefer videos and pictures, another group might prefer audio. While creating your content, ensure your content calendar includes different kinds of content for different groups of people eg. Carousels, text posts, videos, pictures, graphics, podcasts, case studies, white papers, webinars, lives, and so on. This will keep your page always engaged.
3. Distribute content across different social channels: Every business should have both primary and secondary social media marketing channels. Your primary channel is that place you are 24/7; the place your target audience is always hanging out. The more channels you have to distribute the more you increase your chances of getting discovered by your target audience. However, while engaging in content distribution, cross-posting from platform to platform is not a good idea. Every social media channel has its own nuances, cultural language and style. You need to tweak content to suit it for better results.
4. Invest in running paid social media ads: With paid ads, you can target a particular audience group, so you're sure the people liking or following your page are in one way or the other interested in the products/services your business offers. Bought followers are never your target audience! It's like pitching high-heeled shoes to a crippled woman. She's never going to buy.
5. Increase the number of posts you make per week: In my business, I offer 3 Social media management packages; Basic package (5 posts per week), Large package (10 posts per week), and Extra Large package (15 posts per week). If a business reaches out to me with an urgent need to grow their followers and have a large audience online, instead of buying followers, I'd recommend you get my large or extra large package. The more valuable content you churn out, the more you train the algorithm to make you more visible and the more potential customers you'll attract.?
6. Conduct daily community engagement: Like I said earlier, social media is a two-way communication street. You don't want to talk at your customers, you want to talk with them. Everyday, spare at least 30 minutes to 1 hour, where you'll like other people's posts, reply to comments on your posts, reply to your inbox messages, and reply to posts where you were mentioned. Many brands do this so well on Twitter! Make sure your customers see your brand as a person they can talk to, and this will boost their trust in you.
7. Always measure your success by regularly checking your social media analytics: Social media pages have inbuilt analytics dashboards. We even have some more evolved third-party tools that lets us pull out more insights. They are there to guide you. The data will show you what's working and what's not working. Do more of what is working and do less of what is not working.

In conclusion, always remember that social media marketing is a long game! There's no shortcut to succeeding on social media. If you avoid gimmicks and stick to the fundamentals principles of social media marketing, your success is inevitable!

Are you struggling to stand out in the crowd with your social media content? Book a FREE 30 minutes consultation call with me today and let's talk about your social media marketing strategy!