Crush Your Social

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Would you rather spend $100 to $400 looking successful on your business, or would you rather spend that money being successful in your business? In this episode, we're specifically talking about buying followers on Instagram and looking successful versus building a community that will help you be successful.

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We're going to talk about what buying followers is, but first we're going to talk about why people want to buy followers. Since I've never bought followers, it's hard for me to talk about. And I got lucky because I saw those ads in my DMs when I first got onto Instagram. And I thought about buying followers. Luckily someone in my community was nice enough to say, don't do that, it will wreck your account. So I don't have the experience. I've only had the experience of fixing the problem, and it took a long time. So it's hard for me to talk about it. I know why it's bad, but I haven't experienced it. I can only talk about the aftermath of what I fixed.

So why buy followers? If you're a business owner and you're new on Instagram, and you don't know how to create content that grows your community, you have the opportunity to buy followers.

That's where the problem is, because people think, if I buy followers, then I'm going to look like I'm really successful and people will buy from me. But really the opposite happens because once people become savvy and they understand how to check an account, they can tell that the followers are fake and you lose trust and your account will never sell for you. So people want them because they want to look successful. But what actually happens to them is that they buy these followers and they pay anywhere from $100 to $400 a month to get these followers. And what happens is that the followers are empty. You can pay for engagement too, and the engagement is empty. And when a potential prospect comes to your page and they see no engagement or they see very low engagement and the quality of the engagement is really bad, meaning it's an emoji and it says, or somebody says great post, but they're not validating your knowledge as a thought leader, people will go away. You're spending $100 to $400 a month for this 10,000 followers that isn't doing anything for your content. The way the algorithms work is that the higher the engagement that you have, the further out your content goes. The followers that you have should be in your industry. They should be in your niche and they have to be engaged. So the algorithms look at all of those factors. They look at the industry, the niche, the followers, who they are, where they're from, your relationship with them. And the content only goes out if the algorithms are clear on who needs to see the content, who wants to see the content. And when you have random followers, it doesn't help the algorithms to understand what you're all about.

So there's a huge misconception in the social media world that buying followers will make you look successful.

So who are the followers you buy?

When you buy followers, you're paying a company that pays people to create accounts that they use to follow your account. And these people are just random people. The accounts might look like bought accounts and a bought account is an account that's generated by a computer. But these are real people most of the time that are paid to follow your account and maybe even engage on your account. But they won't use their real names. They'll create a mix of letters and numbers for each of the accounts that they're following so they can keep track of who they're following.

And they won't be people that are in your industry. They won't be people who will understand what you do. So the problem with this is that when you stop buying followers, your account takes a nose dive. When you stop buying engagement, there's no engagement. So what I've been experiencing with people that I've worked with, people who have hired me, was that they came to me and they said, I've got 10,000 followers, I've got no engagement. I don't know what's working, I don't know what's not working because none of the content gets any reach and I think I've wrecked my account. And that's usually what's happened, so we usually have to clean it up and figure out how to get rid of the bot followers. And the followers that we're paid for will just naturally drop off. But what happens is when you go from having a lot of followers to having just a few followers, that also affects the algorithms. So what happens is your account just becomes dead and you can't grow. How to fix it when you've bought followers? If you're one of those people who have bought followers and you're experiencing this problem, you can take some steps to fix it. And the first thing is to optimize your social media page, your Instagram page specifically. Because I don't know if you can buy followers for any other platform. I don't think you can from my experience. If you found other platforms where you can, let me know. So the first thing you need to do is optimize your page. And you optimize your page with keywords and a message about how your service can help someone. And then you wanna create content pillars that has relevant and valuable content for your audience. Because if your content is relevant and valuable, you will naturally start to grow followers. People will want to follow your account because you're helping them or you're giving them information in a way they like to get it. The next thing you wanna do if you're trying to clean up account that's had followers is you want to start an intentional and focused engagement strategy. And what that means is you need to be talking to people in your industry, in your niche, starting to make friends with them and build trust with people that will engage on your account organically.

And the last thing is patience.

The mess you've gotten yourself into if you've bought followers is not something that you can get out of quickly. You'll need to build trust with the people in your industry and potential prospects and you'll need to build trust with the algorithm, believe it or not. The algorithm is probably confused and doesn't know what you stand for, what you do, who should see your content. So it'll take a long time to rebuild that. And you do it by focused intentional content and engagement. So if all of this doesn't convince you not to buy followers, you need to know that if you do buy followers, it violates Instagram's community guidelines and it can lead to penalties like account suspension or permanent deletion of your account. It's not worth it. So what are my three tips for you? If you see those messages on Instagram, block and delete, make them go away. The second thing is be patient. It takes time to build a community, it takes time to figure out your angle. And the temptation will be great to take the easy way out, but don't give into it. Just keep posting, keep learning, keep reading your metrics and it'll come. And if you're paying $100 to $400 a month, what if you put that money into fixing your account and creating an organic following that will build your business for a long time? So what would you get for $100 to $400 a month? There's a lot of ways you can go with that money that will get you help. You can get consultants, you can get strategists on social media, you can get photographers, videographers, you can get a podcaster. You can go a lot of different ways and they're all probably gonna be really good at helping you with your foundational pieces. For me, I'm specific to social media, Instagram and LinkedIn. You could get a simple and easy to follow strategy that would help you get more engagement, more leads, and build your reputation as a go-to expert for whatever it is that you do.

Now let's go crush it.

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