Promoting your brand can seem like a long, arduous process at times. Social media marketing alone is a fulltime job. You have to maintain your presence and your image at all times. You constantly need to be connecting with fans and with other companies in order to build a following. You need to come up with interesting and unique content to post in addition to your blogs and other regular content. Then you need to repeat all of that work for every social media channel on which your brand has a presence, since a cookie cutter approach isn’t engaging. It’s a lot of work, and it can take a long time to yield any visible results. Isn’t there an easier way?
Some people have found one, but it’s a rather dishonest approach. There are companies that will sell you an artificially inflated number of followers, clicks, or page views. The theory is that the boosted numbers will make your content and social media look more respectable, encouraging real interactions and real traffic. Sounds like a quick and easy loophole. So why not shell out a few dollars and take advantage of it? Well, because dishonest social media isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. Here are a few reasons why.
It’s Easy to Spot.
On the surface, it looks like you have a large following on your Facebook or Twitter account. But anyone who bothers to look more closely can generally tell if your numbers are artificially inflated. People followed you or had seen your account before will notice it going up by 10,000 followers overnight. Additionally, on Twitter, where people can actually see who follows you, it will be obvious that it’s full of fake profiles. Most of them have “egg avis” (the default Twitter avatar, that displays a picture of an egg instead of a photo). They don’t actually post tweets or interact with anyone. They’re just a bunch of fake profiles that you paid to have follow you.
It Defeats the Purpose.
Remember, your main goal isn’t clicks or followers. It’s sales. The purpose of social media marketing is to build interest in your brand and your content, which you can then convert into interest in your product or service. Paying for clicks and followers makes obtaining clicks and followers the be all, end all of your social media plan.
It Doesn’t Really Work.
The point of paying for increased social media clout is that people will see what a large following you have and want to follow you themselves. But it doesn’t really work that way. When was the last time you followed someone on Twitter or liked them on Facebook based on how many other Likes or Followers they had? You choose who to follow based on whether or not their content interests you. So in order for your artificially inflated numbers to lead to real numbers, you still have to have an interesting profile that’s worth following, and interesting regular content that’s worth clicking on. In other words, you still have to do all the work that you were trying to avoid by buying followers.
When you try to cheat the system, you only end up cheating yourself. If you really want to pay money to improve your social media strategy, there are more effective ways. A marketing agency or a subscription to HubSpot can make social media easier and help you improve your following much more effectively, and completely honestly.
