It’s sad to say, but many Instagram users take the number of their profile followers as a measure of success. The more subscribers you have – the cooler you are. Rising stars and celebrities of Instagram, who are earning money on advertising, are always boasting the number of their subscribers.
The way the most followed Instagram users evaluate the price of ads on their feed is like this: $2 per each 1000 followers. If there are 50k followers – the ad will cost you $100.
To increase the number of followers some users are buying subscribers via special services. It’s quite easy and costs you almost nothing – you pay something about 3 bucks per 1000 followers. Some services specialize on attracting “quality” followers, but this kind of audience will cost you 9-10 bucks per 1000 followers.
To be honest – to buy followers is not the best idea. Here is why:
Zombie Followers
All those services that offer you to sell followers give you guarantees that for just 9 bucks you’ll get 1000 followers. However, they are not telling you that those followers are not real – those accounts might be stolen ones or even bots.
Purchased followers will not like and/or comment on your photos. These are zombies, just a sandbag. You are buying just numbers, not the real and engaged audience.
Our Hootsuite peers had an experiment — they created a dummy account and bought followers. A week later, they checked the engagement and saw zero likes on the photos in that account.
The number of bought subscribers decreases by itself
Hootsuite experiment clearly shows that the number of subscribers is decreasing by itself. In a week after those followers were purchased – their number decreased twice, cause Instagram automatically deletes all the fake accounts and disables bots.
You can’t simply buy a million of followers and become a top-blogger once and forever. In couple of months all the purchased followers will vanish.
Followers purchase is easy-to-track
I guess, only callow marketing-managers are using the number of followers as a tool for account evaluation. Experienced professionals know that it’s not about numbers on profile, but it is the audience engagement that matters the most.
If your profile has 100k subscribers but your photos get 100-200 likes and almost no comments – then it’s obvious that your audience is not engaged, it is not a quality audience. Any marketing specialist will know that these are purchased followers and will not run any advertisements on that profile.
Instagram is also conducting purges in order to delete all the fake accounts and followers’ markup. Instagram deactivates all the bots, technically, it can also delete an account that was followed by the bots, but we haven’t heard of such cases yet.
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Don’t compromise yourself by buying followers. Invest that money in the regular and interesting content instead.
Take great photos and post them with the right hashtags. And sure enough, use Onlypult to schedule your posts and track the analytics.
