Why buying Instagram followers is a terrible idea?

The whole point of social media (Instagram here) is to be social- to engage. And therefore buying Instagram followers might be a terrible idea for your brand.

6 reasons why buying Instagram followers is a terrible idea.

1. No quality engagement

Buying followers means having fake followers for your brand. This means buying followers who are not at all interested in your brand. Even if the followers are paid to engage, they might not show any effort to involve in any way with the posts on your page. This also might include spam or inactive accounts.

2. Low tier traffic

Most of the followers you buy are people from tier 2 and 3 countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, etc. These include the countries with a low income per average person and developing countries. This lessens the scope for your brand to spread among potential audiences.

3. You might be supplied with bots.

A bot is not a real person, just a piece of code who might have absolutely no knowledge of the content of your brand. They might comment and engage in a way that would make no sense at all.

4. Red flag for Instagram

There is a general vicinity of percentages of all the activity that happens on Instagram. When you buy followers, there is a huge difference in activity percentages, as those fake followers do not engage in content as the genuine ones do. The Instagram algorithm quickly recognizes such activity and your account is flagged!

5. May get a Shadowban

Shadowban is a term used when an account doesn’t comply with Instagram’s terms of use. This scenario is possible when the nonsensical behavior pattern of your fake followers crosses that safety mark, or for any other such reason. Getting a shadowban can restrict your account visibility on feeds, searches, hashtags, and related, which can result in reduced engagement and failing to grow your account on social media.

6. Degrades ranking of future posts

Fake followers mean low content engagement or no good quality engagement. This results in low account credibility, which automatically makes your account look less genuine.

All the above factors then reduce the ranking of your posts in the future which takes your account to a whole new low point.

The worst part is- it takes time to build something and takes moments to destroy it. So when you buy followers, not only do you destroy your brand in the present but mess it all up completely for the future.