Followings have become a social media currency. The more followers you have, the more noticeable you become. You can either use that following to market your own business or market that following for potential sponsors and business partners.

In theory, buying followers is an investment. You pay a few hundred dollars now and reap the benefits of the extra exposure. On top of that, you might attract new followers that contribute to more organic growth in the future.

However, there’s a reason why most successful social media content creators don’t buy followers. While an instant increase in numbers gets you some attention, other factors affect your long-term growth. If that isn’t enough to cast doubts, fake followings are a well-known issue for social media platforms (especially Instagram) and steps have been taken to eliminate fake accounts and penalize those who pay for them.

Let’s discuss why you should never rely on paid followings.

1. Fake Followers Don’t Improve Engagement

Most computer-generated accounts that are made to follow paying accounts don’t interact. Simply put, they don’t comment, watch, view, or like your content. Of course, you can pay for these interactions individually, but imagine how much of an investment that is—you’ll have to pay for likes and computer-generated comments for each Instagram post.

Additionally, paying for bots to fill up your comment section is bound to cause some problems. Not even Google has the technology to detect what an image is all about, so you’ll most likely get irrelevant comments that don’t have anything to do with the actual content.

Having one well-received photo or video does not show actual influence. If you’re not getting mentioned by other users on Twitter, or the comments on your Instagram posts are unrelated to the actual photos, people will get suspicious. If you’re not a regular poster, they’ll assume your account is either abandoned or stagnating.

2. They’re Very Expensive

Again, one or three popular posts among a hundred do not prove actual influence. If you had to regularly pay large sums of money to get your interactions for every post, it’s far too high an investment for so little returns.

Social media marketing works in part because of the organic traffic. As long as you create good content, new (and real) people will come across your account and follow you. Unlike bots, real people can click to your landing pages, buy your products, and contribute to your income.

Bots and fake accounts don’t share your content with real people who could potentially discover you. A fake Instagram account can’t talk about you to their friends and family.

3. It Makes Your Account Look Stagnant

You might have heard of “dead followers” before. The term usually denotes followers that no longer contribute to an account’s social media interactions. When you buy followers, you’ll most likely get inactive followers.

Most influencers and companies know how to spot a fake following. Sudden spikes in follower count, generic comments, and skewed or unusual growth rates are dead giveaways. Some users might even check your followers for unusual activity. If you’re trying to market your business to potential customers, you don’t want to come off suspicious or untrustworthy.

Even if you have so many followers, appearing stagnant tells people that users are no longer interested in your content. This means that you have even less influence than how your numbers might initially appear.

4. Your Stats Will Look Suspicious

As mentioned, social media users are getting better at recognizing fake followers. Your social media stats are public data, and numerous sites (i.e., Social Blade) can summarize or graphically represent specific areas of growth—down to the hourly changes.

Even if you genuinely manage to get every post go viral, your stats should not continually fluctuate throughout your entire online presence. If you were to gain 100,000 followers one week, you shouldn’t get only 100 the next. Multiple spikes throughout the year make it obvious you’re faking a following.

Creators who have organic followings will have some spikes in their stats, but it never drops so low after each viral moment. Organic followers tend to come back to your account or see your posts in their timelines. It’s hard to believe that thousands of people follow you, but they somehow never come across your other content.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have purged fake accounts in the past, deleting millions of them each time. In addition, platforms like Youtube have also included penalties in their guidelines, which threatens to either suspend or delete channels that are proven to pay for botted subscribers.

5. Genuine Stats Helps You Decided What To Post Next

Seeing genuine stats lets you know which of your posts are doing well. If some of them aren’t, you can start looking for something to fix or improve on. If you’re buying comments and likes to increase your numbers drastically, you wouldn’t be able to do a proper audit of your social media marketing campaign.

Posting content that people like brings in followers. People who don’t like your content will walk away, but those who do will stay.

If your audience likes your existing content, they’ll likely be interested in future posts. Interested people are the ones who are going to like your posts, share them with friends, and talk about them on their platforms. Paid bots will not care what you post, nor will they willingly share your content around for new people to see.

6. It’s An Unsustainable Strategy

To avoid getting suspicious stats, you will have to constantly buy interaction bots for the content you put out. You might have to routinely purchase a certain number of followers to mimic organic growth. On top of that, you still have to keep creating content so your account doesn’t look stagnant or abandoned.

Not to mention, there’s going to be a disparity between the number of followers you have with the real people who actually know you. Unless users really talk about or share your content online, not a lot of people are even going to discover your account.

When you pay to get Instagram followers, it only makes you look good at a glance. If you make good, interesting content that gets people talking or sharing, followers will naturally come. Because there is provable interest in your person or brand, you are more likely to gain people’s trust.

Author’s Bio

JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.