Why You Shouldn’t Confuse the Appearance of Customer Engagement With the Real Thing

The following is adapted from my new book: Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing.

The Beatles famously sang, “Can’t buy me love.” But that’s exactly what many companies are attempting to do when they sink large amounts of money into buying likes and followers for their various social media accounts.

Look, I understand the temptation. On the surface, it seems to make sense. After all, it’s better to have more likes and followers, and the fastest way to achieve that is to buy them. Right?

To put it simply, no. No matter how much you want it to be, the appearance of customer engagement is not customer engagement.

Fake likes are just that: fake. Indeed, the only person who profits when you pay for likes and followers is the guy running the shady company that sold those likes to you in the first place.?

Some company leaders believe they are paying for actual likes, as if the provider were a middleman making contact with actual people. In reality, most of these likes come from fake accounts created by the provider. It’s a disreputable industry, operating on the edge of legality, and no respectable business should have anything to do with it.

The Allure of Easy Likes

There are an estimated 3.6 billion people on social media, and that number is projected to increase to 4.4 billion by 2025. That’s half the population of the human race! People of all ages, from young children to seniors in their eighties and nineties, are active on various platforms.

According to research, in the United States alone, individuals spend an average of one hour and fifty-seven minutes every day on social media. These statistics will come as no surprise to anyone who has a teenager at home.?

What may come as a surprise, though, is that this number doesn’t even place the United States at the top of the list for social media usage. The top spot belongs to the Philippines, where people spend more than four hours per day on social media!

With such a massive audience apparently at your fingertips, it’s easy to see the allure of grabbing your piece of the social media action. Spending a few thousand dollars to get tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of likes and followers can seem like an easy way in.?

But this is not social media marketing. It’s the modern-day version of fool’s gold, and should be treated with equal skepticism.

The Issue With Fake Engagement

The problem with buying artificial likes and followers is that they don’t really drive business. It might be exciting to see big numbers after your posts, but you’re not creating actual engagement. Indeed, in terms of actual impact on your bottom line, it’s more effective to have a hundred real followers who are actively engaged than 10,000 phony followers who just pad the numbers.

Fake followers don’t produce leads, because no fake account is ever going to buy from you. Fake followers don’t visit your website. Furthermore, if they’re not actively engaging with you, they don’t really encourage real people to pay attention.?

You might think that boosting your likes will have a trickledown effect, by encouraging the social media algorithm to put your content in front of more people, but it could have the opposite effect. When you have a social media account that is padded with thousands of fake followers and likes, your engagement level, as a percentage of those followers, is going to tank.?

Think about it. What does it look like when you’ve got 100,000 followers but none of them ever have anything to say to you? Yes, 100,000 people liked your post, but none of them are engaging in a conversation with you. That’s going to do more harm than good, because when your engagement score drops, your social media account ranking will drop along with it.

Don’t Invest in an Illusion

Sometimes, companies will go a step further. Beyond buying likes and followers, they will pay one of these shady companies to actually make content posts for them, too. These tend to be spam, or at least low-quality posts, that eventually drive away the company’s few real customers. What’s the point of getting 10,000 fake people to like your spam posts, when the 200 real, live customers get annoyed and tune you out?

It’s a dangerous game. Besides driving away the small group of followers that makes the biggest impact on your bottom line, you might also get caught. People are more concerned about internet privacy than ever before, which has put increasing pressure on social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.?

The noose is going to tighten for fake accounts, fake followers, and fake likes. You don’t want to find your legitimate business in the crosshairs, just because you bought a bit of social media response. It’s not worth the risk to your reputation.

In terms of real dollars and cents, the cost of fake likes might be low, but don’t forget the opportunity cost. You can spend a thousand dollars to get 100,000 easy, fake followers, which will make almost no impact on your bottom line. Or, you can focus your time and money on earning 5,000 real, live followers, who will engage with you and build your online reputation. Unfortunately, when companies decide to do the former, they tend to neglect the latter.

The Power of Meeting Real People

When I worked with a software company called iTexico, we decided to hold annual customer councils to deepen our engagement with our customers and get honest feedback, directly from them.

We invited them to Guadalajara, Mexico, to visit the operations and meet with the management and engineers working on their projects. It was an opportunity for the company to have face-to-face conversations with its customers, in both business conference rooms as well as social settings, as we wined and dined together.

As valuable as these interactions were, an even greater value came out of inviting prospective customers to these same customer councils. Honest conversations between prospective customers and current customers had a powerful impact. These conversations carried far more weight and credibility than anything the company might say, or even demonstrate.

Letting prospective customers interact with current customers provided opportunities for unrehearsed, authentic sharing of experiences, and customer testimonials that no conventional marketing or CEO-talk could ever achieve. We found that nearly 80 percent of our prospective customer guests became actual iTexico customers after attending these customer councils.

Focus on Creating Real Engagement

That’s the power of real, authentic, and live engagement. Don’t waste a penny on fake likes or make-believe followers. These are exactly the kind of lies you want to avoid.

Take all of that money you would invest in fake likes, and instead spend it on creating deeper engagement and converting real customers into brand advocates. Just a handful of people with a positive view of your company is worth all the fake followers in the world. Beyond likes, they are the ones who will actually comment, discuss, and praise your brand, products, and services.

For more advice on how to drive true engagement through smart marketing, you can find Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing on Amazon.

Atul Minocha is a partner at Chief Outsiders, a marketing consulting firm that helps CEOs accelerate growth through strategic planning, customer insight, and disciplined execution of well-crafted marketing plans. With experience in startups and Fortune 500 companies like Honeywell, Kodak, and Toyota, Atul works in a wide range of industries, from automotive and healthcare to industrial goods and technology. Atul has a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and an MBA from Yale University. He is a professor at the Hult International Business School, a mentor and an angel investor with Sierra Angels, a Vistage speaker, and a Forbes contributor.