Do you want to grow your Instagram account? Are you addicted to likes and comments? Maybe you’ve considered buying followers, but is it worth it? Read this to find out!
What’s Instagram’s Position on Buying Followers and Likes?
Before weighing the pros and cons, let’s first see what Instagram has to say about artificially inflating follower numbers:
Foster meaningful and genuine interactions.
Help us stay spam-free by not artificially collecting likes, followers or shares, posting repetitive comments or content, or repeatedly contacting people for commercial purposes without their consent. Don’t offer money or giveaways of money in exchange for likes, followers, comments or other engagement. Don’t post content that engages in, promotes, encourages, facilitates or admits to the offering, solicitation or trade of fake and misleading user reviews or ratings.
So, they don’t want you to buy likes. What can they do to your account if you do? According to their Terms:
We can remove any content or information that you share on the Service if we believe that it violates these Terms of Use, our policies (including our Instagram Community Guidelines) or we are required to do so by law. We can refuse to provide or stop providing all or part of the Service to you (including terminating or disabling your access to the Facebook Products and Facebook Company Products) immediately to protect our community or services, or if you create risk or legal exposure for us, violate these Terms of Use or our policies (including our Instagram Community Guidelines), if you repeatedly infringe other people’s intellectual property rights or where we are required to do so by law.
*We can also terminate or change the Service, remove or block content or information shared on our Service, or stop providing all or part of the Service if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts on us. In some cases when we remove content, we’ll let you know and explain any options you have to request another review, unless you seriously or repeatedly violate these Terms, or if doing so may expose us or others to legal liability; harm our community of users; compromise or interfere with the integrity or operation of any of our services, systems or products; where we are restricted due to technical limitations; or where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons.*
Despite this, there are services available allowing you to buy followers for as little as $10 for 1,000 followers. However, a lot of those followers will be bots or inactive accounts, so don’t expect there to be interaction or engagement.
If you do get engagement, for instance, from inactive accounts created for the sole purpose of getting and giving follows, it’ll drop off relatively quickly. Engagement is key for Insta’s algorithm, so artificially inflating numbers with no engagement may be a waste of money.
Without likes or comments, your post probably won’t show up on your audience’s newsfeeds, and it also won’t show up on any Explore Pages.
It’s also now more difficult to buy fake followers compared to a few years ago, due to the more stringent terms of service imposed by Instagram.
Legitimate engagement or a farce?
Paying for likes and followers can also hurt your credibility. Having a lot of followers could convince users to follow you organically, but it’s not a guarantee. If you’re caught with a ton of fake followers, you could ruin your credibility with your real audience.
Users might notice you don’t have a ton of engagement on your posts, which could deter them from following you. If you have 10,000 followers but only four likes per post, it won’t take people long to realize something is up.
Would you keep following an account you think is deceitful? Probably not, right?
In addition to potentially losing engagement, your metrics could be distorted.
It’s practically impossible to measure how well your target audience is connecting with your brand if a high percentage of that audience isn’t real. How will you measure posts that do well with your real audience if those bots and inactive accounts skew the ratio?
Accurate Data is the Key to Success
If you don’t know how well your posts are doing or what your real audience thinks, you’ll never convert your Instagram followers into real customers. So what’s the point? Instagram is more likely to purge accounts with fake followers, likes, and comments. Especially from third-party apps that are designed to artificially grow accounts’ audiences.
Take the time and energy to grow your account and brand organically. If your content is engaging and authentic, your loyal followers will spread the word and engage with your brand without needing any bribes.
Here’s what you can do to gain meaningful engagement and loyalty:
- Make your account public
- Give users a reason to follow you buy publishing quality content - change things up. Post images, videos, quizzes, reels - the sky’s the limit
- Use hashtags. People can follow specific hashtags, so the more relevant ones you use, the more likely someone scrolling through the Explore page will start following you
- Use all of Insta’s amenities - Live, IGTV, Stories and Shopping
- Engage with other Users - like, comment, follow other accounts, share their content. The algorithm favours engagement like this, making your page more likely to end up on Explore pages. Be careful to not overdo it. Instagram can block users from engaging with content if they liked and commented on more than a few hundred posts in an hour.
Don’t waste your time and money on buying followers.