Numbers Aren’t Everything.

But… not all metrics are the same.

In the social media/marketing/IT world we are very fond of data. I’ve said numbers aren’t everything, but more true to the point is that some numbers are important and some numbers are not. While I do agree having a large number of followers looks good (and I’d be lying if I wasn’t proud by the fact that I’ve grown my following to over 50,000 on Twitter), there are other metrics that I feel are more useful and important. How about…

• How many people engage with you on a regular basis
• How many Twitter lists people have added you to
• Shock horror- how many leads and sales social media is driving!
• How much traffic to your website your social efforts are driving

Let’s stop looking at the number of fans and followers and look at the things that matter!

However, you’ve stumbled across this article, so you are curious aren’t you?

How to Buy your Followers

There are plenty of services out there which claim to boost your numbers. Many say they can boost your numbers quickly. Some services offer to do this for free and some require payment.  There are a number of different methods that they can employ.

1. Aggressive Following Technique. (Twitter Only) By following a large number of people each day, waiting for them to follow you, then unfollow those who don’t follow you back it is possible to artificially increase your followers very quickly. This goes against Twitter’s terms and conditions and so is definitely to be avoided. There is nothing wrong with following or unfollowing a large number of people every now and again, but if Twitter think you are aggressively trying to increase your followers by follower/unfollower churn methods, you are likely to get your account suspended. Note- a service will need you to give permission for it to access your Twitter account in order to follow Twitter accounts
2. Zombie Account Following. (Facebook & Twitter) By paying a 3rd party you can get 100s, 1000s of even 10,000s of followers or likes. Generally each supplier has a database of twitter or Facebook “zombie” accounts that they can use to follow or like you. These are usually completely inactive accounts, sometimes with random names with jumbled up letters and numbers.

Why is Buying Followers so Bad?

When you buy followers or fans, you aren’t getting people who are interested or willing to engage with you. You are merely buying numbers. After paying for followers/fans or engaging in aggressive follower churn, you are likely to get a large number of fake accounts amongst your number. Blogger, Zach Bussey, decided to do an experiment and create a new Twitter account and Buy Instagram Followers. Overnight the number of followers of his new Twitter account increased to a whopping 26,000! It got interesting when he analyzed the results and looked at the Twitter accounts that these fake accounts followed. Doing this enabled him to have a good guess on other people who had paid for followers!

#2 You end up spamming your followers.

This isn’t always the case, but some even more evil Twitter Follower services ask to access your Twitter account to send out multiple messages advertising their way of increasing people’s followers. This is just going to annoy your followers and give you a bad name, which brings me on to…

#3 Loss of Integrity and Reputation.

In this post-modern (or post-post-modern!) world we live in, morality is perhaps more difficult to define since everyone has a different view of what morality is. However, it is fair to say that people see buying followers as a rather immoral thing to do. People view it as you trying to appear more popular than you are and doing it by dodgy means. People may not know that you’ve bought followers, but going from 30 followers or likes to 30,000 in the space of a couple of days is bound to get people suspicious, and then your integrity and reputation could well be in tatters.

#4 You’ll get found out!

In fact, a lot of people are currently getting found out. It is fairly easy to find out the names of people who are being followed by fake accounts as I mentioned in the first point. However, a new tool on the block is making it even easier. The Fake Followers Check check from Status people analyses your followers to see how many are fake. The interesting thing is you can do the analysis on other accounts too.