Are you tempted to buy social followers?

[Hook Solutions]

Have you in the past or would you consider it? We would love your stories and views (Confidential if necessary of course) for a series of articles.

Thanks.

 

[That Bates Girl]

No

 

[fisicx]

Buying social followers is as pointless as creating social bookmarks. The onlky people who benefit are the ones who get your money.

 

[Hook Solutions]

Another question would be - What makes you click that 'Follow' button and what stops you?

 

[fisicx]

Nothing makes me click the 'follow' button. I bookmark a site if I want to visit again but that's about it.

Following someone just means I get even more junk in my various feeds. What benefit is there in me 'following' tesco or some random site selling socks or whatever?

I'm not miserable, I just like to keep my facebook page for feeds from people I know. My wife keeps following things and then complains that her news feed is mostly adverts and promotions.

 

[threenine]

Nope!

Utterly pointless thing to do! Don't understand why anyone would waste money doing such a thing! It's like walking into a pub and buying everyone a drink, regardless if you know them! Then expecting them to buy you one back!

 

[HorseLatitudes]

I'm a pretty big user of Instagram for personal use. I have a rather large-ish following and you know these are from genuine people who have chosen to follow me as its reflected in the amount of likes per photo. I think I have just under 1700 followers and the average likes per pic must be about 150, and thats without using any hashtags for non-followers to find me.

But then you'll see people with 5k+ followers who'll only be getting 10/20 likes per photo and it's fairly obvious they've purchased followers. To be honest I'm more than likely to choose not to follow such a person/business.

The only way to make a success of social media is through effort and engaging people with a shared interest in what you have to offer.

Hashtag posts sensibly, talk to people without pushing yourself on them and the followers will come naturally.

The more followers you get who interact with your page, the more others will follow.
I tend to pick up around 5/10 new followers a day now without having to log on at all.

 

[ReviewsThatStick]

Definitely no. I am fine with just bookmarking it just like fisicx said. It is much easier and you won't have to bothered with a flooding of newsfeed.

 

[ClickWebStudio]

My answer is no - it's a violation of social network policies.

However, to those of you saying it would be a waste of time - I disagree. If you take a look at some psychological studies on these (and similar) matters, you will see that actually people are far more likely to 'follow' or 'like' your page if they see that many others have done so.. It's basic psychology and it DOES work.. But not enough for me to be tempted to give my money to policy violators or become a policy violator myself.

 

[fisicx]

Maybe likes do get more likes. But do the studies show how much new business those likes generate? I'd rather have the phone ring than get someone liking me.

 

[That Bates Girl]

My answer is no - it's a violation of social network policies.

However, to those of you saying it would be a waste of time - I disagree. If you take a look at some psychological studies on these (and similar) matters, you will see that actually people are far more likely to 'follow' or 'like' your page if they see that many others have done so.. It's basic psychology and it DOES work.. But not enough for me to be tempted to give my money to policy violators or become a policy violator myself.

Social proof (i.e. people tend to like what other people already like) is a well documented social phenomena. It's why bestseller lists work and why Whiskers spent so much time telling us that 8 out of 10 cats preferred their tinned horsemeat to everyone else's tinned horsemeat. But it's just one influencing factor among many.

Cialdini identifies 5 others:

• Authority
• Like (in the sense of 'similarity')
• Commitment and Consistency
• Reciprocity
• and Scarcity

Sure, you will get followers who follow you because you seem popular, but 'follows' don't pay the bills, you've still got to move people from 'seeing your tweet' to 'buying your stuff'. And if you can use social media to do that, you probably don't need to buy followers in the first place.

Not to mention that getting followers is easier than keeping them, and the fact that if/once they twig that you've bought most of your followers, the authority you lose may be much more significant than whatever benefit the followers brought in the first place.

Lyds

 

[CPSMedia Carl]

No, whats the point in paying for a load of people who dont care about your services, its totally pointless.

I dont even value followers, I wouldnt waste my time trying to get real ones, I would much rater build a list that I own. In my opinion the only thing social is good for is buying cheap traffic.

Im not saying it doesnt work for some people but for me it just takes to much time for to little return

 

[Peanut Print]

We had thought about it, but at the end of the day there is no point and worthless to the buyer. Probably not even real people.

 

[MASSEY]

I have seen members on the forum who have bought face book followers and posted the little box with their bought followers on their site, to me it is clearly fake, but to potential customers, especially the ones who use facebook alot, it could help with credibility.

 

[beasty]

Nope!

Utterly pointless thing to do! Don't understand why anyone would waste money doing such a thing! It's like walking into a pub and buying everyone a drink, regardless if you know them! Then expecting them to buy you one back!

Nice analogy, agree 100%

I see FB pages where they have obviously bought followers, that business is instantly tainted and the best bit is they PAID to destroy their image as presented to the ORGANIC natural visitors!

It screams start up, stupid, careful, dishonest and many other things to me.

NO I would be happier if there were a service where i could REMOVE rubbish followers!!!

THAT would have value to me, i deleted a Twitter account with 11,500 followers, waste of time, energy and basically if it makes no money why do it?

I speak to many company owners in a week and without exception the ones that are proud of their FB likes are a brand new company with few sales or an older company also with few sales

NOT A SINGLE successful business has volunteered any information about their Facebook likes as if it mattered.

Having a certain number of LIKES or followers on Twitter is not a measure of success, it is more a function of misguided effort and or expense

LIKES GENERATE MORE LIKES? someone said
Well this may be true, but do those MORE LIKES become customers
I would argue that the FALSE popularity presented, will put off REAL POTENTIAL customers and do more damage than good.

 

[jdluckhurst]

But then you'll see people with 5k+ followers who'll only be getting 10/20 likes per photo and it's fairly obvious they've purchased followers. To be honest I'm more than likely to choose not to follow such a person/business.

Social proof (i.e. people tend to like what other people already like) is a well documented social phenomena. It's why bestseller lists work and why Whiskers spent so much time telling us that 8 out of 10 cats preferred their tinned horsemeat to everyone else's tinned horsemeat. But it's just one influencing factor among many.

Just playing the devils advocate but Lyds point is possibly the only reason why you would want to buy followers, to LOOK like you have some credibility. However, if as HorseLatitudes puts it there is very little engagement then it looks a little silly - it just points to the fact that either you do not post what your followers are interested in or you are just plain boring.

Much better to develop a more organic strategy and create REAL engagement. That way each post will receive more likes/comments, thus increasing credibility. The fact that you are engaging with real people means that you are much much more likely to develop real sales from people who are genuinely interested in your product or service.

 

[Markrichard]

I do agree with what fisicx said as it's totally worthless if you are going into this kind of business deals like buying follower or liker and also, it's not going to help you directly. It can happen though that with those 100 paid likes you move to 500 likes later stage and those 400 likes you get later may contain some potential customers related to business. But, Again point is who gave you business? not those 100 likes for your page surely business generated from later 400 people who came to know about your page anyhow and liked your business services as a genuine customer.

 

[noo81]

No I wouldn't consider buying followers for social sites. I would rather have someone follow who was genuinely interested.

 

[HazelC]

I understand why people do it - if you are a brand new company and you want to look 'big and popular' you may choose to buy likes and / or followers. However it is worth remembering that all they are is a number, these 'followers' you have paid for will never interact or engage with you so it is just to make you look more popular than you are.

I have not done it myself and would not choose to, but I know of a company that did. It did them no harm in attracting new followers however they gained nothing from these followers directly.

 

[Young Recruit]

Big London agencies fabricate hundreds of thousands of fake social media shares, and use fake accounts to make their clients, (many well known brands - supermarkets, insurance companies, car manufacturers), look good online, have seen it first hand.
No, you don't get engagement, but you do get instant credibility if you have great reviews, lots of likes and re-tweets, sad but true... every little helps!!

 

[Alan]

I would argue that the FALSE popularity presented, will put off REAL POTENTIAL customers and do more damage than good.

It is fairly easy to spot people who have purchased followers. I was on one today, 5,000 followers yet virtually no interaction with their posts. So for the more 'in the know' users (which are growing in number) it instantly told me what sort of business this was, one that was trying to lie to me about their popularity. I moved on.

 

[beasty]

Someone on here who I will not name.. obviously bought followers UK company,

WEEK 1 like
week 2 0 likes
week 3 500 likes MOST POPULAR CITY? Istanbul.. !

Does not impress anyone and consider this, to get Istanbul knocked off the number 1 spot and LONDON to be the top city as a UK company might expect, is going to take a VERY long time!

 

[Unshoesual]

I don't buy 'likes' or followers but occasionally on Facebook, I will promote a post. I'll only stick a fiver on it but if it's a sale item / offer, I want it to get to as many people as possible.

I agree though that buying your 'likes' affects your overall page. The other thing that winds me up is people 'liking' your page then saying 'please come and like mine back!' They're clearly just liking yours in hope for a return like. I watched another start up business at the same time as me do this. She has double my likes but half of my interaction on her page.

As someone mentioned, all social media is a long winded job but if done properly, can work brilliantly. I do get sales through my page and quite a few questions so worth doing but I rarely use twitter as find that better for business to business.

 

[beasty]

I don't buy 'likes' or followers but occasionally on Facebook, I will promote a post. I'll only stick a fiver on it but if it's a sale item / offer, I want it to get to as many people as possible.

I agree though that buying your 'likes' affects your overall page. The other thing that winds me up is people 'liking' your page then saying 'please come and like mine back!' They're clearly just liking yours in hope for a return like. I watched another start up business at the same time as me do this. She has double my likes but half of my interaction on her page.

As someone mentioned, all social media is a long winded job but if done properly, can work brilliantly. I do get sales through my page and quite a few questions so worth doing but I rarely use twitter as find that better for business to business.

I ignore those people and sometimes quietly remove them from friends lists if they happen to be on them, (I did use fb to network a little in the past, but now only do this on linked in, take pleasure in culling, FB, SKYPE, LINKEDin..

 

[webgeek]

It's great when the competition buys a ton of Facebook likes. Suddenly, they've gone from 10 fans to 1000 fans.

Then the competition starts posting messages. Suddenly, instead of getting 1 or 2 likes and an occasional share of their posts (10% or 20% like, 2% or 5% share rate), they start getting .01% or .02% like, .002% or .005% share rate), the FB algorithm decides that the general public couldn't possibly be interested in their posts (since their fans aren't interested) and their exposure rates / viral distribution get squelched.

They're muted and blocked from wider reach because of their own apparent 1000 fans success.

There's other quick ways of getting likes/followers than buying fake ones. Take heed and don't go down that route.

 

[HazelC]

So true 'Young Recruit' - even if you look at large supermarkets and such like they will have thousands of fans on a social media platform but only a small amount will be talking about them.... even if they are all 'real' fans.

 

[HorseLatitudes]

Big London agencies fabricate hundreds of thousands of fake social media shares, and use fake accounts to make their clients, (many well known brands - supermarkets, insurance companies, car manufacturers), look good online, have seen it first hand.
No, you don't get engagement, but you do get instant credibility if you have great reviews, lots of likes and re-tweets, sad but true... every little helps!!

While I have no doubt that that happens, it's a little different to just buying social followers.

The resources to create all of those fake profiles, write reviews, retweet, comment, share and to continue doing it day in day out must be massive.

 

[HorseLatitudes]

I don't buy 'likes' or followers but occasionally on Facebook, I will promote a post. I'll only stick a fiver on it but if it's a sale item / offer, I want it to get to as many people as possible.

I agree though that buying your 'likes' affects your overall page. The other thing that winds me up is people 'liking' your page then saying 'please come and like mine back!' They're clearly just liking yours in hope for a return like. I watched another start up business at the same time as me do this. She has double my likes but half of my interaction on her page.

As someone mentioned, all social media is a long winded job but if done properly, can work brilliantly. I do get sales through my page and quite a few questions so worth doing but I rarely use twitter as find that better for business to business.

I may be wrong but isn't that just paying for an ad to be displayed to a particular target market? Nothing wrong with that IMO.

Both myself and my missus received the exact same post from the exact girl on instagram the other day. This girl didn't follow either of us but wrote "please follow me" on a picture each of ours.

I just ignored it and but was flattered that someone was so desperate for my attention.

My missus, however, is a fiery Scottish lady with the temper and tact of an ogre with a hangover. Her reply of "And what on earth would I get in return for doing that?" was enough to make the girl delete her comment and disappear.

 

[fisicx]

Doesn't anyone really care if Tesco have millions of followers or thousands of people 'like' a shampoo?

 

[davehayes]

Buying social followers is as pointless as creating social bookmarks. The onlky people who benefit are the ones who get your money.

I agree, its pointless buying social followers, I spoke with a guy recently who spent £500 on it, in the hope of making 20 sales!! ~ Why?

 

[beasty]

I agree, its pointless buying social followers, I spoke with a guy recently who spent £500 on it, in the hope of making 20 sales!! ~ Why?

That is why!
Loads of people HOPE things will work then change direction, there are loads of ways to burn money on HOPE, its an education that you are paying for called experience

 

[helmuc]

ok... I have been long enough online and - yes >> I did buy both twitter and facebook fans 2 or 3 years ago..

well, at that point it was worth for 100%. The direct impact was: more traffic from FB and twitter, better rankings, more real followers and I felt better as well.

But that was then...

As the time was moving on Twitter started cleaning their system and gradually I lost 90% of the followers (all fake accounts). And you know.. I felt really good about that as at that moment I could really understand the impact my brand had there

... as for now Twitter is my main social network and I have a dedicated monitor (will add 3 more at some point) for monitoring twitter streams. Outlived twitter stream: https://twitter.com/Out_Lived

about Facebook... I am still waiting for the day when Facebook will clean their systems or will come up with an option where I can remove Likes from my side. Outlived FB page: https://www.facebook.com/outlived

About the temptation... YES, hell yes - I would be happy to pay for real followers, but only if it is done properly..

Let us separate Fake followers from Real followers right here >> Real Followers = people who use that social network actively.

Let us be honest - it is all about the budget and professionals who know how to work with social networks >> if you don't have both above mentioned components - forget about doing that.

At the moment I can't afford to buy Real Followers from neither the Twitter nor FaceBook.

BTW, did you know you can buy followers from Twitter directly? >> check them out at https://ads.twitter.com/ .. and I don't see anything bad about that - if it is done professionally... just the prices are way too high :/

And yes - I would be happy to spend $500 to get 20 Real Fans... but not at the cost of destroying the fanpage :/

It is a war after all
Helmuts

“who does not know the evils of war cannot appreciate its benefits” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

agree? disagree?

 

[10032012]

Nope!

Utterly pointless thing to do! Don't understand why anyone would waste money doing such a thing! It's like walking into a pub and buying everyone a drink, regardless if you know them! Then expecting them to buy you one back!

Not quite. In a similar way to what @ClickWebStudio said, I have purchased social media credibility before. The key is knowing that not one single one of the followers/likes etc. will bring you any money, sales or interest... all the accounts will be fake and it can harm your reputation.

So what did I spend £20 on then? Google +1 ... Google was jumping on the bandwagon, Google was effectively forcing webmasters to actively use it... and no one will share your page if no one has previously done so (the big blogger and portal websites wit the share tools rarely had anyone sharing with Google +1 at the time). The concern to me was... under that business as an adsense publisher, if I don't engage with this Google suggestion (wasn't very subtle)... it could affect SERPS and revenue.

I don't recommend buying friends and followers etc for facebook and twitter. There is no short cut - social media takes time. But in all honesty (I sure I am not alone) I am not remotely interested in Google Plus or Google +1... the former was a major flop before Google enforced people to use it to get on Google Maps and Google Search! I still don't think the +1 is anywhere near as successful as other social bookmarking tools, facebook shares/likes and twitter tweets.

I also don't recommend buying backlinks (i.e. on the cheap, usually spammed on forums and zero post accounts etc.) as this can get you penalised.

I took the risk with the Google +1 - and perhaps a coincidence, it really did a small but noticeable SEO boost, but even more so the revenue increased quite significantly. I didn't pay anyone to click adverts or to run a bot programme to achieve the same (both would easily be detected and result in account termination or amounts deducted from your account balance, not to mention fraud is illegal) and there is probably no one in SEO who can really determine how much weight +1 has (if any) on the search algorithm... but for the sake of twenty quid this ultimately resulting in increased traffic and more revenue. more uniques = more revenue. simple.

If it makes any difference the +1 clicks were spread over multiple articles and not thousands on the homepage. I am rather surprised Google didn't suspect that the clicks might have been fake. Oh well.

 

[webgeek]

There is no short cut - social media takes time.

Not all 'short cuts' are inherently bad. A short cut should simply be a more direct route to a destination or solution. Choosing which corners to cut, and how to cut them, is one hallmark of a great F1 driver. Don't overlook a more direct approach to your goals, particularly with social marketing.

With social media, there are ways of saving time (taking short cuts) that are not all about gloom and doom.

For example:
- promoted posts
- facebook ads
- giveaways, contests, events

Any or all of these three are ways of reducing time by increasing spend.

In other words, if you are willing to spend a bit, you can quickly build likes/followers/fans. You can also drive relevant traffic to your page and/or main website using this same approach. These are faster routes to your desired outcome, thus making them short cuts.

If you're aiming for shares, then you can spend the money on content production and publishing things worthy of being shared by the masses. Again, you're reducing time to achieve the goal of increased sharing or share counts by increasing spend.

There's a lot more things that can be done, but simple ones like the four above are some of the techniques you can use to speed up your social marketing.

 

[lynxus]

Absolutely Not.

2 Kinds of people will follow you.

1) Robots. - Useless to you.
2) People who follow anyone. Also useless to to.

 

[10032012]

Not all 'short cuts' are inherently bad. A short cut should simply be a more direct route to a destination or solution. Choosing which corners to cut, and how to cut them, is one hallmark of a great F1 driver.

no no no... you are not allowed to cut corners in F1 - would get you disqualified!

A great F1 driver has a great racing line (i.e. the shortest possible distance around the track), this is by no means a short cut... its common sense, all F1 drivers, champions to the few to make the numbers up... all aim to achieve this.

 

[webgeek]

Quoting the rules, when most of the rules are unwritten? F1 and SEO have a lot in common.

There's a time and a place for jumping the chicane. Just ask Pedro de la Rosa...
http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2008/09/16/four-of-f1s-unwritten-rules-video/

Whether the current unwritten rules allow for this or not is moot. The points that matter:
1) There are both written and unwritten rules in SEO and social media marketing.
2) Understanding the current status, and direction things are heading in the near term, are essential to competing.
3) Accepting that things will be slow, take a lot of time, and cannot be done any faster is a defeatist mentality that isn't doing business owners any favours.

There's no need to step outside the moral high ground or the law, but rather a need to be clearly advised.

If business owners can just keep in mind that there's more than one way to do it (whatever 'it' may be), they'll have a chance of entering, competing and ousting the current competitors who are holding the prize.

 

[DavidP2P]

I bought into a service that I thought was good value at £200/month that guaranteed to bring me 1,000 targeted UK, niche-specific Twitter Followers per month with original content Tweets. "That's a bargain!", I thought.

The service was, in my opinion, just a SPAM-generation system, that didn't provide any of the above, just modified quotes of someone else, non-targeted, non-UK, and not near 1,000 per month. I was just paying for a counter increment, and could see little or no value. Yet it was described as a multi-million dollar business!!! I stayed with them for 2 months before bailing out.

Get real customers instead with real interaction in my opinion.

 

[helmuc]

I bought into a service that I thought was good value at £200/month that guaranteed to bring me 1,000 targeted UK, niche-specific Twitter Followers per month with original content Tweets... The service was, in my opinion, just a SPAM-generation system, that didn't provide any of the above.

Well, in your case £200/month can take you quite far... it isn't too difficult to get genuine UK 200+ followers/month (1k is not real)... But the story is different when you talk about Active accounts that are niche and country targeted... almost impossible.

I would suggest to find another person (companies will be more expensive). Just make sure that the person he/she has a decent twitter account as he/she will have to use it to kickstart your following.

Can't find anybody... call me or....

try this guy https://twitter.com/Bensonix .. just ask him 1st as he doesn't offer services like these - David is really good and has good quite a lot good contacts with other influential twitter personalities.

wishing you all the best,
Helmuts

p.s. love this quote: Man is not made for defeat! /Ernest Hemingway/

 

[theBagShoppe]

I bought likes for one of my page in start but they are very irrelevant fans, they don't have sense to my business so they are useless as business point of view. The only benefit I got is that when someone come to my page they don't feel that they are only one to like it so they feel confident to like it!! LOL, funny but true!