STOP buying Instagram followers!
If you type ‘buy real Instagram followers’ or ‘buy real Instagram likes’ into any search engine, you will get thousands of results from companies promising you the easy way to Instagram growth.
Many of these companies seem to have amazing (ly fake) reviews from Instagrammers who’ve bought their way to Instagram fame and fortune. There is obviously a market for it, with over HALF of UK Instagram accounts engaging in some kind of fraudulent activity.
There was probably a time when this strategy wouldn’t have hurt so much, except raising eyebrows of competitors or friends. But Instagram is drastically changing, and it’s noticeable. I previously wrote about declining engagement rates on Instagram and how Instagram has shut down many of the most popular automation tools on the market. Well, guess what? This has a knock on effect on those people that run networks of accounts. (People don’t sit there manually following accounts, sadly!)
Reasons not to buy Instagram followers, ESPECIALLY now;
It doesn’t equal business
So you’ve reached your goal of 20k followers. Then what? These spam accounts aren’t going to interact with you and your engagement will take another nosedive. The average Instagram engagement rate is only between 1-3%, so you’re going to skew your engagement rate even lower. Yes you can buy likes too, but this is even worse and it’s very easy to spot.
It makes your business look bad
In my opinion it would be far better to have less likes, but more genuine comments and followers. Any small brand starting out now should aim to build this type of community. Once Instagram removes the ‘like’ count, you’ll have nothing but comments to prove your engagement.
Instagram knows, and will punish you
Not only will they actively delete all of your spam followers, rumour has it that buying fake activity will reflect negatively on your accounts performance in general. Meaning your future content will be seen less and less, and you will possibly be shadow banned, blocked, or even deleted!
Most importantly, it’s actually against Instagram’s terms of service. What would we do without our Instagram account to browse cat and food photos in our spare time?? DO NOT get deleted! :)
Of course, there is also a lot of spam without you necessarily buying it. Been losing some followers recently? That’s probably Instagram doing one of its weekly cleanses.
Remember that at any one time, anyone can check your credibility which is most applicable if you’re someone with an ‘influential’ following. There are some free tools out there that can calculate your estimated real followers with one click. There are even tools that monitor your growth, so they can see if you’ve suddenly injected 1,000 or 5,000 followers in a day. Basically, you can be OUTED!
Just be real, post good content and actively engage. That’s what Instagram is supposed to be all about!
But for the fuller, more in depth strategy with all of my tips and tricks, stay tuned for the book :)
