The goal of social media is to establish a genuine connection with your target audience by posting relevant and engaging content on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Focusing on organic growth allows you to build relationships with followers, which encourages them to interact with your brand even more.

However, organic growth takes a lot of time, commitment, and effort. For instance, if you want to get real Instagram followers, you must commit to creating top-quality content for your Instagram audience so they get the desire to follow your profile. Many people try skipping the hard work and buy followers instead. Although it looks like a great way to get the initial boost you may need to make the right impact online, you might want to reconsider as the risks outweigh the potential benefits.

Below, we look at five reasons why it’s better to focus on organic growth instead of buying followers.

It’s Against the Rules

If you’re caught buying fake followers, your social media account can end up being suspended and shadowbanned. All social media platforms have rules against buying followers and ensuring that their online community is safe and has genuine connections among their users.

If, for instance, Instagram sees that you’re buying followers, it will shadowban you, and your account will no longer be searchable through hashtags or displayed on the explore page since you broke Instagram’s Terms of Use.

Essentially, the social media algorithm will make it difficult for people to find your account making it impossible for new followers to come across your account organically. On top of this, getting shadowbanned is irreversible which can be catastrophic for your company’s social media account.

You Risk Getting Fake Accounts

If you buy followers from a third-party source, you run the risk of getting bots and fake followers. This means that any engagement you receive on a post is not from a real person, making it difficult for your digital marketing team to plan the social media content calendar for the upcoming period.

Marketing teams can usually analyze what posts are performing well and create similar content to engage their followers. However, if most of the followers are fake or bots, it can be hard to tell what type of content you need to create. Buying followers can make it much more difficult for your social media team to make data-driven decisions.

Buying Followers Damages Your Brand Reputation

If you’ve ever followed a brand online, only to realize that many of their followers are fake, you know how it affects your perception of the brand. This is the reason why buying followers can damage your reputation and taint your brand image, and make your account and online activities look fraudulent. Nobody wants to see this happening because this will dilute your influence, make you look utterly unprofessional, and distract you from tailoring social media content that resonates with your target audience.

Buying Followers Will Confuse Your Social Media Metrics and Audience Information

Not only will buying followers make engagement difficult to track, but other social media metrics and audience information like demographic info, click-through rate, geographic location, and post reach will also be negatively affected.

If you wish to create memorable posts and social ads that speak the language of your customers, having relevant followers who are interested in your brand, is essential.

Organic Growth Offers the Opportunity to Hear Directly From Ideal Customers

It’s a great feeling when you get an insightful comment on a social post or a positive DM from your followers. Seeing followers engaging with your brand is the ultimate goal of being on social media channels.

Real customer sentiments are crucial as they help you formulate new products, services, or even marketing campaigns. Listening to your customers’ opinions and sentiments can make a world of difference as it will set your business apart from the competition in a competitive market.

On the other hand, if you buy your followers, you will not get the same level of insight as with real followers. Fake followers might even comment on unrelated comments or not even engage with you at all, which will make it much harder for you to filter out unrelated bot activity and receive all of the valuable conversations with customers in your comment section or DMs.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to achieving social media success. Although buying followers may seem like a clever growth tactic, it can negatively affect your brand presence in the long run by getting you banned and preventing you from connecting with your audience.

If you’re considering such an option, take the time and think this through as you can lose your credibility and hurt your organic growth.