I have heard a lot of argument over people saying its a good or bad idea to buy followers or likes on social networks. Most of the time the people that are for buying followers and likes have an agenda such as they have a business or service that want to promote that has to do with buying followers or likes. On the other hand the people that say they are bad typically have some good points but overall don't know what they are talking about. In this blog I will give pros and cons to both sides and have you decide what is better.
Pros to Buying follower and Likes:
There are many pros to buying follower especially from an SEO stand point. When Google is crawling and ranking websites on the search engine we know they look at your social media and will see how active you are on there which includes how large your audience is. If you audience is small you are not going to reach your target market and your voice will not be heard. This is the #1 fact in my opinion on why buying followers is important on social media networks. If Google sees you have a large audience they will rank you higher and they don't care how engaged you are with your content or followers. Google just wants to see you have an audience and you are active on your social media accounts by putting up new posts. This has been documented by Rand Fishkin from Moz that Google holds more value in activity from the owner and how large the audience. All though comments and sharing are somewhat important they are not as important as most people think.
There are many digital marketing companies out there that buy real social media accounts and they will use this in there network to follow or like your page once you pay for their services. These accounts are typically real people that have unique IP addresses that still use there profile but also let other digital marketing companies use it for a fee. This is legal and it works very effectively to give you a targeted audience in an industry or area. Don't be surprised if they don't like or share your posts though. If they don't that means your post might not be interesting or they have so many businesses they follow that they don't have time to like an share everything you post.
When your page or post get a lot of attention from likes and followers, Google notices that. Google weighs Facebook, twitter, Youtube, and Instagram very heavily as an authority and will notice when your page gets a lot of likes and followers. This will directly effect your rankings and you will notice your website will start going up in the search engines and will eventually get more attention form potential customers.
Getting more likes and followers makes your website look more creditable. When your social networks start getting more followers people are more inclined to follow you because you have a large audience and because of that they assume you are credible and have interesting things to say. They don't care who is following you or why they just see that your company is in an industry they are interested in and you have a lot of followers so they will follow you as long as you are being active. It turns into a snowball effect.
Cons of Getting Followers and likes:
Buying followers will not guarantee that your business will see more sales. Whether you are buying real followers or fake followers they will not buy your product or service just because they are following you. That is not a realistic approach. I follow many businesses that I will never buy from but that does not mean I am not interested in what they have to say.
There are companies that will create fake accounts or robots that they will use to give you followers and likes. They are not a targeted audience obviously because they are fake but they do create some value for your social page for a short period of time. Overall having robots following you or liking your post is not helpful because eventually those social media networks will delete inactive users if they have not used their profile within a certain period of time.
Lastly, there is a chance that fake followers could also end up doing damage against your real followers by hacking, phishing, and infecting real followers with link spam. This does not happen a lot but they are out there and you will need to do your researcher before you buy followers or likes.
In Conclusion:
There is a lot of value on buying followers and likes but they also have pitfalls just like any other product and service you would buy. Some companies see value in buying social media followers and likes and others don't. I really comes down to what you prefer. In all honesty you can get thousands of followers and likes all by yourself. It wouldn't be easy and will take a long time but it is possible if you are savvy on social networks. If you are not good and getting followers and likes on your social media accounts Orange SEO can help. We can create great social media campaigns and get real and targeted followers and likes.