Everyday hundreds of people join Instagram, hoping to create a fan following by sharing their stories.
But gaining followers isn’t for everyone. It takes a lot of work and engagement to convince people to follow you.
To avoid the hard way people invest loads of money in purchasing fake followers without realising the consequences.
Today we’ll discuss the problems with fake followers and some practices to help you gain real Instagram followers.
Fake followers don’t interact
Whether you’re an influencer or a brand, engagement plays an important role in the growth of your profile.
When followers interact with your content and share it, you get exposed to a new set of audiences.
Say, if I like your recent post on “Content calendars” and share it as a story on my IG handle. My followers would see the story, and if they like it, they might end following you. This also conveys that I trust you as an account on the platform.
If your followers won’t comment or share your content, you won’t generate brand awareness and complete your marketing goals.
Leave irrelevant comments
Comment section of Instagram is where people interact with your content. When someone asks a question or compliments your post, it attracts other people to take part in the conversation.
Sometimes, people also judge your content by the number of likes and comments.
Which comment do you think will create more engagement: “good” or “Great post! I like it. Keep sharing.”?
Fake followers leave generic comments without context to the post. You might end up with comments like “Nice dress” on your post about SEO infographic.
These comments create poor impressions of your brand, and people believe you are nothing but a fraud.
Alter your metrics
Metrics are important to measure performance on social media platforms.
People invest heavily on analytics tools to observe user behaviour and collect essential data, but fake followers alter the metrics by unexpected interaction or no interaction at all.
Suppose your followers comment for three consecutive days but then don’t engage for the next thirty days.
In such situations, the metrics won’t give you solid data to decide your next step.
Even if you purchase Instagram followers, their behaviour is unexpected and distorts your performance measures.
Your account could get banned
Instagram punishes accounts that invest in fake followers. In fact, it’s against the Terms of service of the platform.
To address this problem, Instagram continuously checks to filter accounts with suspicious behaviour and if found guilty, your account could get banned.
Fake followers create spam
Fake followers equal spammers. There’s no guarantee the bought followers won’t take advantage of your data. They could scroll through your profile and spam your real followers. If you’ve linked your website or added your mail, they might use it to send viruses or spam mails.
How to gain real followers?
Let’s discuss some practices to help you gain real followers.
Create quality content
Why would people follow you if they don’t find your content helpful?
Most users don’t stress on the quality while creating content. This is a huge mistake because people want content that provides value.
A good practice is to take the time and research on what people like around your niche and produce high-quality content.
Use platform specific functions
Instagram offers several features to help you create engagement.
You can use stories, IGTV, reels, filters, IG live and advertisements to promote your account.
Experiment your content
Your content could be the reason you aren’t attracting followers. Maybe your audience likes video posts and infographics over text posts. If you publish text posts, your followers won’t connect to it. To address this problem, you can experiment with different content until you find what your audience wants.
Be creative
Your creativity reflects the appeal of your content.
You can either take the same approach that millions of people are following or bring something new to the table. People appreciate fresh content and share it with their followers. You can surprise people with your creativity to stand out from the crowd.
Conclusion
There you go. These are the reasons you shouldn’t buy fake followers. If you want to attract real followers, create quality content and focus on providing value to the audience.
You can test your content to understand your followers and use all the platform specific features to create engagement. The hard way is better than investing money in fake followers that bring several problems with them.