Don't Buy Your Friends Folks

Don't Buy Your Friends Folks

Everyone running a social media account wants more friends. Everyone in life wants more friends. I promise you, buying social media friends or followers, or buying friends in real life is not your best option. This route can result in confusion, loss of credibility, lack of engagement and overall pointless.

If you bribe someone to be your best friend, they might join you on your trip to the library or even go out to eat with you on a Friday night. However, they won’t really want to talk about what you want to talk about, listen to your problems or even want to be there with you. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a beneficial relationship to me.

The same concepts go with social media followers. If you end up buying you social media followers, you might not end up with the results that will benefit you or your organization in the long run. Paying for followers will give you a higher number of followers on your profile, yes. However, the reason you want more followers is because they will engage in your posts, share your content with their friends and hopefully become a customer to your product or service. If your followers are paid for, you will be able to make follower quotas for the week, month or even year. However, you will not receive higher levels of engagement, retweets, communication or response.

The next question becomes what is the real value of another follower on social media? If I don’t think having a high number of inactive followers as your goal, what are the benefits to real, actively engaged social media followers? First, I think following your social media account could be their next step to becoming a customer. Hopefully, your content is in a place that will not only enhance their social media experience, but give them a positive and persuasive image of your product or service. Gaining a follower on social media could also open up your account to new views. If your followers likes your content, they might begin to repost it. This could show your content to an entirely new group of people. This is one of the incredible aspects of social media, you are infinitely tapping into new groups of people possibly on a daily basis. Followers could open up conversations directly from consumer to company with ideas, feedback, reviews, comments and more. Hearing directly from your customers is a huge benefit for your marketing efforts. Lastly, I think social media engagement can create authentic momentum, enthusiasm and traction.

There are endless opportunities and benefits with engaged followers on your social media accounts. Having fewer, more engaged followers can be a much more beneficial route than having a large number of followers who never interact with you. Although buying followers can be tempting and having more friends seems important, doing the hard work to gain followers through good content will be worth it in the long run. Just remember, it will be worth the wait!