It is not a secret that Instagram is the social network of influencers, a large majority use it more frequently when promoting services or products and earn money for each sponsored publication for their audience due to the great attraction, interaction and traffic that generate with their followers.
In fact, it seems simple: the more you grow your following, the more visible you will make brands with the right budget to establish a commercial agreement. But is not.
Beyond having a large number of followers, for this to work the influencer must have or give value to their content so that it gets closer to their fans. It is what really encourages a brand to partner with an influencer.
You may be interested in reading measuring the effectiveness of influencers
Taking into account all of the above, on Instagram an algorithm change was registered a long time ago that changed the way of finding posts: what was previously displayed in chronological order by default, now only messages from those with whom you are most connected are displayed interact, making it harder to gain likes and followers.
Brands and influencers use the platform to generate income, this becomes more complicated than usual.
Buy Instagram followers
Because every change that Instagram makes the process of reaching people and followers a little harder to do, some brands resort to unflattering tactics like buying Instagram followers.
How do they do that? There are two popular methods:
- Create multiple fake accounts and have them as your brand content.
- Subscribe to a service that provides access to Instagram bots that will follow or like photos on related accounts. The bots then stop following the account to maintain a more ideal rate.
- As such, both methods are considered unethical cheating in most cases. Rest assured that if you apply it and someone detects it, it will be negative for your brand.
- That is why here we share the reasons why you should not buy Instagram likes and followers.
- Your fake engagement rate is on display
The theory says that the more followers you have, the more interaction on your Instagram account you should have; however, many times you come across profiles that have a million followers, but get less than 2,000 likes per photo. By rule of three, it is easy to know that they have many fake followers.
To do it in numbers: Instagram accounts with less than 1,000 followers have an average engagement rate of 8%, while accounts with a range of 1,000 to 10,000 followers have an engagement rate of 4% and then there are those with 1 million, which typically averages 1.7% engagement.
Useful numbers to compare where the real deal is. Still, tools like Social Blade or Follower Check can help you understand if a profile has fake followers or not.
If you get caught, Instagram will purge your account
If you bought followers on Instagram and got caught, hopefully you will only get a warning the first time, and your bots will be removed.
Instagram’s policy for its users is that they upload posts and interact in real time. Anything that isn’t real-time or requires automation isn’t something Instagram looks at positively.
In fact, it has a team dedicated to identifying spam to deactivate accounts without any problem, so much so that in 2014 alone it purged millions of fake users from many Instagram accounts in order to bring more authenticity to the platform.
This measure mainly affected celebrities, who were hit hard by the drop in followers.
In case it’s still not clear, buying Instagram followers is not a good move because, apart from running the risk of losing your account, you will also invest large amounts of money in bots that will be eliminated due to Instagram constantly purging that, needless to say that fake followers don’t buy products or promote your brand.
Also, fake likes only do very little in the way of making your brand look bigger than it really is.
Not worth it
Ultimately, the fact that you have tons of followers does not necessarily mean that brands will want to work with you. Brands are smarter now, in addition to their follower metric, they also look at engagement rates.
If you do not have real followers, you will hardly be able to demonstrate a good interaction rate, you will not be able to work with any brand since they will not want to waste their efforts if you do not engage with their content. Also, you will lose money with the constant purging of Instagram.
Don’t buy followers. It may be tempting, but you have to remember that it is better to have a small, focused, and active community than a group of fake followers who will not be able to interact with or buy your products or services.
Buy Instagram followers in California can be tempting, but it will do you more harm than good. The best thing you can do is allow your community to grow organically and adhere to Instagram policies to avoid getting your account closed and wasting time and money on something that will bring your brand down.
