Is there a method you can use to gain hundreds, thousands or even hundred thousands followers or fans on your social media accounts? There is and, moreover, it’s really cheap and absolutely effortless. Should you do it though? Absolutely not!
In order to understand why this is a bad practice, you need to know how it works. There are many companies (third parties) that are charging as low as €5 for 1000 followers. Usually, they have a huge database of what the industry calls “zombie accounts”. They are not active and have random names.
Besides increasing the number of followers associated with your account, these followers do absolutely nothing. Of course, it looks good to have 50.000 followers, but this is not the way to acquire them. We are going to explain why.
1. Fake accounts don’t generate engagement.
As we said before, these accounts’ business is to follow you and that’s it. They will never like, comment, reply, retweet etc.
2. It’s easy to get caught!
There are multiple tools that allow you to test how many fake accounts are following you (or other accounts). The one provided by socialbakers works really well.
3. Social Networks don’t tolerate this
Recently, Instagram rolled out a script that eliminated all the fake followers, leaving some really important accounts (celebrities, big brands) with half their original number.
Advice: When you hire a company to manage your social media accounts, make sure they do not engage in shady activities just to have something that looks good to put in your monthly report.