The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance ran a long list of musicians through an Instagram audit, and it turns out that these famous musicians are not quite as famous they appear. Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande had an outrageously high percentage of fake Instagram followers. Taylor Swift's real followers are anticipated to only be 54% of her 122 million followers while Ariana Grande's account appears to have 76 million fake followers.
As a business owner or marketing department, you are most definitely tempted to jump on the "bandwagon". If your online presence appears to be one of lower standards than your competitors, we may assume that customers would bypass your company.
The real question is, How relevant is social media to your business? Do you gain customers from social media? Here are some thoughts to consider before you boost your followers by purchasing them'
1. Fake followers don’t engage
Don't expect to receive a single like or comment, despite the thousands of new followers. Bot's can not create unique responses to your images or videos. Even if you buy engagement, all you will see is a consistent flow of a single engagement.
2. Fake followers are obviously fake
Anyone who so much as glances at a follower ratio can guess that the followers of an account are fake. Unless you are Beyonce or Adele, following zero or two accounts doesn’t get you very far in terms of earning followers yourself.
And if people click through and look at the actual follower list, their suspicions will be confirmed. Fake followers often have names that look like they were mashed into a keyboard (plenty of numbers and random letters), they usually only have a few posts, their photos are often random, and they almost never have Stories.
3. Brands will blacklist you
If you looking to assume the status of a budding influencer, fake followers will not help you. Potential partners running your account through even the most basic Instagram audit tool will show you as a wannabe influencer!
4. Instagram might suspend your account
Instagram has a vested interest in making their platform a place where people want to spend time. But an army of fraudulent accounts doesn’t make anyone feel human, let alone connected. Accordingly, Instagram’s been taking a lot of steps towards reducing unwelcome behavior on the platform.
Fake accounts are regularly purged by the platform, which means your followers could disappear at any time.
Many small business owners have tried this tactic to only find that the new followers never fall within the target demographics. Meaning that they will never generate any revenue from these followers. Social media is a tool like many other marketing tools. Every resource that gets allocated to the tool whether financial or other, needs to generate a return on your investment. Do that calculation before buying fake followers.