There are an abundance of people and companies out there offering paid likes and followers for your social media profiles, the rates are often reasonable (on average £23 per 500 fans) and the offers can be tempting. But is paying for your social media audience a good idea and is there any benefit?
Should I Buy Followers & Fans?
In a word, no! I would never recommend buying social media fans, it may look impressive when a potential customer visits your social media pages and sees that you have tens of thousands of followers, but in the long run it can be damaging your business and your brand.
Most of the time the followers you are buying are fake accounts i.e. not real people. Even if they were real people who were active on social media, the chances are they are would not meet your target demographics or be engaged with your content or your brand and therefore offer no benefit.
Lets say your businesses target audience is males between the ages of 18-24, would you spend a portion of your advertising budget targeting females between the ages of 40-54? You simply wouldn’t waste your advertising budget marketing your business to people who didn’t meet your target audience demographics. Spending money on followers is exactly the same thing!
Buying followers and fans can potentially damage your brand, for example if your Facebook business page has 77,000 page likes, but your page posts have low levels of engagement (i.e. likes, shares and comments), potential customers may see this as a negative reflection of your brand, products or customer service.
What Can I Do?
Social media for business is about getting your target audiences talking about and recommending your business, in turn generating leads. If your profiles are showing a high following with low engagement levels, that only gives out one message – no one is talking about or recommending your business and few leads are being generated.
With 90% of consumers trusting peer recommendations compared to only 14% trusting advertisements, your business cannot afford not to be social. The best way to start the conversation is with high quality content that engages your target audiences.
If you have money to invest in growing your social media presence, your budget would be best spent on hiring a professional social media marketer that understands how to get the most out of social media for your business and how to reach your target audiences or on Facebook/Twitter advertising.