Once And For All: Do Purchased Instagram Followers Hurt Your Brand?

Who doesn’t have at least one friend who can’t imagine their lives without Instagram? In recent years, in addition to being the ultimate platform where we share snippets and selected moments from our daily lives, Instagram has also become a fertile marketplace for brands and businesses to promote themselves. If you don’t believe this statement just yet, ask any small/bigger-scale brand you know, and they’ll tell you.

Indeed, the people behind this addicting app have learned its impact and the great potential it holds to exceed the limitations of ‘a classic’ social media platform and added another brand-new layer to its usage. It is safe to say that businesses failing to take this due transition from offline marketing to establishing a prominent online presence puts their revenues at risk of being no longer relevant. Since a decent portion of the shopping in 2024 is done online, people turn to Instagram services such as Instapalace or SocialProofco.

Why Do Brands Buy Instagram Followers?

Now that business runs in the online front, social media engagement’s importance has grown even more, and consequently the rush after Instagram followers and likes is amongst the most common acts to take to ‘survive’ in this competitive sphere. Such services are there to supply us with on-demand engagement, and it’s no wonder why they lie at the heart of the Instagram game.

One of the first rules any Instagram rookie commits to memory since their first few minutes on the app is; engagement is a key metric for Instagram’s algorithm, by which it determines which posts will end up on the ‘Explore’ tab, thus getting millions of views every day.

If you buy gradual Instagram likes, your posts are more likely to appear on the ‘Explore’ page. Since brands want to create a reputation for being popular quickly, they turn to buying Instagram followers, making people believe that they are already a famous brand on the social media platform.

Behold Digital Marketing Experts’ Unpopular Opinion

But here’s our experts’ take on it: artificial Instagram engagement does not mean real engagement. Instead, falling for this scheme is not only a waste of your precious money, but it could also be hurting your brand eventually.

The truth is, when you buy Instagram followers cheap, you actually decrease your organic engagement in real life and also create a negative brand identity, which could be quite fatal to your page’s credibility in the long run. Think of it this way; imagine a potential customer who visits your brand’s page for the first time, and the first thing that appears before them is a social media page with fake followers.

Chances are, they will think your brand is also a fake one, resulting in boycotting your brand altogether. This is how you lose real customers and sales, just for the sake of a high Instagram followers’-count.

How Does ‘Artificial’ Engagement Harm Your Brand?

Reason #1: People Can Tell When You Buy Followers

Since everybody uses Instagram nowadays, there are many ways to check whether your followers are real or fake. If your likes-to-follower ratio is too low, it can be a sign that you have purchased the thousands of followers that you have. This puts off many potential customers – leading to lower sales for your brand.

Reason #2: Instagram Has Strict Rules

In the past, Facebook and Twitter deleted tens of millions of fake accounts on their platform. Due to this trend, Instagram has started removing fake likes, followers, and comments from accounts purchasing followers to enhance their social media presence.

If you continuously keep buying fake followers, the chances are that Instagram could punish you by having your account shadowbanned – or refusing to show people your content. Other strict punishments include banning your account altogether and blocking your username – meaning that you will not be able to create a new account for your brand. Therefore, buying Instagram followers could result in your brand being banned from the vast world of Instagram.

Reason #3: Fake Followers Don’t Mean Real Business

The whole purpose of having your brand on Instagram is to make it beneficial for your business. Regardless of the number of followers you purchase, you will not be getting any real business deals out of them – deeming them rather useless to your brand’s growth. All your investments would be going to waste by purchasing fake Instagram followers since you will not create any business deals or brand loyalty in customers.

What To Do Instead?

Fortunately, the following alternatives will help you promoting your IG page without the fear of being punished by one sanction or another.

Content Is King

For a start, don’t forget that content is king on social media, and Instagram is no exception. Therefore, instead of joining the herd and buying Instagram followers from the first site you come across, ignoring the consequences for such a deed while doing it, the best solution for immediate engagement with your posts is publishing posts regularly (the more, the merrier, on that regard!).

If you’ve run out of ideas for new and exciting content, you can see what’s up with leading influencers in your niche; who knows; maybe you’ll find inspiration in one of their posts and upload an adaptation that would be at least as booming as the original!

Tags And Hashtags Are Always At Your Service

If you want to grind a few more followers and other engagement metrics, add tags and hashtags in your posts. Where regular tags are concerned, you could gain more eyeballs to see your posts simply by tagging the friend that appears in the photo with you. Easy as pie, isn’t it?

As for hashtags, use them to make your posts even more visible. The hashtags’ rule of thumb dictates that by adding hashtags, your posts are more likely to appear in the search results when people look for a particular hashtag. Take a minute or two before ‘launching’ your next post, and conduct hashtag research to find out which hashtags would suit your page’s content the best.