Over the past decade, social media has changed how customers interact with businesses. Customers now discover, follow and interact with brands directly via social media, and regardless of what your product is and who your target customer is, your business is expected to have some sort of social media presence. 

Most businesses use multiple platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Some brands have even built their business models entirely around these platforms. But how do you build your following and get your business and products in front of customers? 

One tactic that’s especially prevalent on Instagram is buying followers. Unfortunately, this rarely works, and often ends up costing you more time and money than it’s worth. 

Here’s why we don’t pay for Instagram followers and you shouldn’t either:

Buying followers decreases your account’s engagement 

When you buy followers, you might increase your follower count in the short-term, but you also end up decreasing engagement. Engagement is measured as the number of interactions (likes, comments, saves, shares, views on videos etc.) on a post as a proportion of your total follower count:

Engagement = Interactions / Total Follower Count ‍

Buying followers decreases engagement because it increases your total followers without increasing the number of interactions on your posts. It’s important to keep engagement high on your business’ Instagram account because Instagram shows posts to customers based on engagement and interest. If you’ve ever noticed that someone's posts have disappeared from your personal Instagram feed, it might be because you weren’t engaging with their posts and Instagram has taken that as a signal that you want to see less of them. The same can apply to your business’ account and followers. 

Low engagement also makes it easy for Instagram and your competitors to tell what you’re doing. They’ll be able to take one look at your follower count and the actual engagement on your posts and figure out that most of your followers have been purchased. Instagram can even shadowban your account as a result, meaning they’ll limit the people who can see your posts in the future.

If you purchase followers, you also run the risk of skewing your engagement data. Your business’ Instagram account engagement data is free: as long as you have a business account, you can view this data by going to the top right menu and selecting Insights. Engagement data can be useful to understand how much your account has grown over time, when most of your followers are on Instagram and what types of posts they like. But purchasing followers means your engagement data will include these followers, and it’s nearly impossible to distinguish the data from actual customers and purchased followers.

Purchasing followers also increases the amount of spam and bots tied to your account

Most of the time when you purchase Instagram followers, you won’t be paying for actual people to follow you either. You’ll be getting a lot of fake, spam or bot accounts that were created for this purpose. Increasing the number of these accounts that follow you carries a certain amount of reputational risk. 

Not only can Instagram remove these followers by deleting their accounts without warning, but your actual customers may see these accounts and view your business negatively as a result. After all, who wants to be following a spammy account? By purchasing followers, you risk losing money and ending up with worse outcomes. 

It’s worth a reminder that fake, spam and bot accounts aren’t people, so they also can’t actually purchase anything from your business and become your customer!  

Paying for followers violates the Instagram Community Guidelines 

Finally, paying for followers is a direct violation of Instagram’s Community Guidelines:

Violating these guidelines can result in your posts being limited or removed, and your account being deleted entirely. If you’ve already put time, money and effort into your business’ Instagram account, that can be a huge disappointment.

So, what should you do?

It may be tempting to buy followers to quickly boost your Instagram account, but as you can see, there’s a lot of risk and not a lot of upside to it. Spending time to grow your following organically by providing high quality and useful content is the best way to go. 

Instead of buying followers, see if you can use that money towards other promotions. Whether they’re on Instagram or not, well-planned and well-executed marketing promotions will go further towards growing your business.