Many brands incorporate social media into their marketing strategies to generate traffic and leads that keep their business moving. You are less likely to encounter an online business that doesn’t use social media as a marketing medium than one that does.  However, results vary across industries and companies. A lot of those differences can be […]

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However, results vary across industries and companies. A lot of those differences can be attributed to the way businesses use social media and content marketing to promote their products and services. A business must guide customers from a place of awareness to the point of purchase (and beyond).

If you want to make your social media a more effective digital marketing medium, you need to do more than just post content. Instead, you need to consider different touchpoints and marketing channels to bring you a step closer to converting your ideal customer. By creating a social media funnel, you can develop content for each step of the customer journey.

Let’s look at the different stages of the social media funnel and discuss how you can design a funnel that yields maximum results.

What is a Social Media Marketing Funnel, and How Does it Work?

A social media marketing funnel encourages the conversion of potential leads into customers on social media. It involves several stages of customer engagement with your brand, from where they learn about your brand to the point where they purchase and are comfortable making referrals to your business.

With careful analysis, a social media sales funnel can help you understand:

• Your buyer’s intent and what motivates potential leads to explore and patronize your business;
• The marketing tactics that work best for customers at different stages of the customer journey; and
• Different ways to reach out to your audience by creating different types of content that takes them to the next step towards making a purchase.

With these in mind, how does a social media funnel work? Most non-social sales funnels look like the one below:

Source

However, the interactive nature of social media makes it complicated to map the buyer’s journey. Different customers can have different experiences with a single brand on social media. It looks more like a spectrum of actions, and a customer can jump from one part of the funnel to another in just a few clicks:

Source

As a marketer, you’ve probably seen this happen often. The good news is that you can still use a traditional sales funnel in the context of social media. The challenge lies in incorporating different types of user engagement into each sales funnel step to help you reach the goals of your marketing strategy. Let’s look at each stage and how you can create content and increase engagement and conversions with each step.

Awareness

Every marketing funnel starts with the awareness stage. Here, a potential customer can discover your business for the first time. Your job is to provide the necessary information that gets them invested in what you already offer.

Rather than trying to close an instant sale, focus on creating different types of content suited for leads at the top of the funnel. Usually, the people at this stage stumbled upon your business on social media because they have an interest and are actively searching for products or services in your industry.

It’s also vital to leverage tools that streamline the process of connecting with high-quality leads. A deal sourcing platform can serve as a valuable resource at this stage. By positioning such a platform as a solution for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for, you can enhance their discovery process. This tool can facilitate a smooth transition from the awareness stage to the consideration stage by filtering through opportunities and presenting the ones that align with their interests and needs

Hence, the objective in the awareness stage is to attract those leads using brand awareness strategies, and the goal is to show them how your business can solve their problems.

To do this effectively, you must understand your customer persona. This will allow you to target and build an audience that you can communicate with effectively. The idea here is to offer valuable information that keeps people invested and willing to move to the next funnel stage.

Social media is already an excellent medium to share content that attracts attention. You can leverage it by answering audience questions, posting tutorial videos, or streaming webinars or promotional live videos.

For example, Absolut uses tutorial videos to show users that it is a good drink for mixing:

The video teaches viewers how to make a simple Citron Lemonade cocktail with standard bartender equipment and Absolut Vodka. Although this is an Instagram tutorial video, a link in the account’s bio directs visitors to Absolut’s YouTube page, where they can watch more video marketing content.

In cases where you’re trying to build an audience for a new product and have the budget for it, you can invest in paid social ads to increase brand awareness and reach. Alternatively, you could try influencer marketing to promote your product and drive traffic to your social business page or sales landing page.

Consideration

As potential customers become aware of your products, they start moving through the social media funnel. At this point, begin to consider if your products answer specific customer pain points. They will also compare your brand against its competitors in terms of reviews, features, and customer service.

How do you convince and convert potential customers at this stage? The consideration stage is all about showing value. You show value by creating content that highlights the benefits of your products.

Types of content that are effective in this stage of the funnel include blogs, social media videos, infographics, and even white papers that present your product being used to solve real-life problems. Detailed information like these assures potential customers you’re the best option, subsequently building confidence towards your brand.

To reach your audience in this phase, you’ll have to retarget users who have recently come across or interacted with your brand so the message sticks. Alternatively, if you cater directly to consumers, sharing webinars or video demos like Anthony’s is a superb way to remain in the minds of your audience.

If you have a sales team you can offer support via email and phone to offer an even more personal experience. There are omnichannel contact center tools that can help ensure your ads, webinars, demo videos, and customer support all stay in sync.

Anthony’s Goods shares a smoothie tutorial on Instagram using their products. They invite their audience to take action by shopping for the same ingredients on Amazon or their website, pushing them to the next stage of their social media funnel.

Because potential leads can experience the impact first-hand, sharing tutorials and other kinds of informative social media content is a fantastic way to convince your audience to go for your products.

Action

In this stage, your leads are ready to buy from you. It also means you’ve successfully built a good relationship from the start, and now, they see a reason to trust you.

As we explained, the phase leading to the action stage is sometimes short, primarily if your business operates in a high-traffic niche like consumer goods. On the other hand, other niches have a considerably longer sales process, and potential customers will require more persuasion and nurturing in the funnel to spur them to action. Social proof and testimonials from other customers are often key motivators for action.

But before you convince them with social proof, you need to track your performance in the previous stages and determine whether your content has been successful up to this point.

Thankfully, many social platforms have analytics built-in. Check critical metrics using social media engagement tools to see how you measure up before launching your next social media campaign where you can utilize social proof. If you can, offer discounts for new customers too.

Here’s an example of a brand using social proof and incentives to encourage shoppers to buy from them:

Sephora’s Facebook account does not just contain beauty tips; it also acts as a virtual storefront. Some of its content links back to product pages.

In the example above, Sephora’s Facebook Commerce page has a comprehensive list of products, some of them are marked as “Sephora Quality Really Good Price” or “Clean at Sephora”. They help convince customers that the products Sephora sells are not just reasonably priced; they’re also friendly to the environment. These badges seal the deal with bargain hunters and earth-conscious consumers, respectively.

Engagement

Congratulations! You’ve acquired a new customer. Now, it’s time to retain them.

The engagement stage in the social media funnel is all about grooming customers to be lifelong enthusiasts of your brand. They’ve made a purchase, alright — but it doesn’t stop there. Constant interaction with your new customers nurtures the relationship and shows them that you care.

Consider how you can include buyers in your social media community. Build engagements using trends to reassure your customers about the authenticity of your brand. For example, you can use hashtags on Twitter or Instagram to engage your customers and get them talking about your brand.

Remember Coca-Cola’s #ShareaCoke campaign? It was all over different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The hashtag is so effective that people still use it now.

Source 

The campaign’s purpose was to create a deeper relationship with consumers through engagement. By changing the Coca-Cola product packaging to show typical first names, the brand created a community of loyal consumers.

You may not be able to pull something so over the top for lack of budget. Nevertheless, aim to personalize the marketing campaign at this stage, as 80 percent of consumers are likely to buy from brands that offer personalized experiences and the retention rates for these brands are higher than those that don’t offer personalization.

Advocacy

While many people think action and engagement are at the bottom of the funnel, the advocacy phase of the social media funnel takes engagement one step further. It’s dependent on how customers become comfortable enough with your brand to talk about them to people.

While the engagement stage is where you create lifelong enthusiasts for your brand. The advocacy stage is where you convert your current customers into active brand advocates and community builders.

To achieve this, you need to encourage customers to spread the word about your brand and leave their reviews and testimonials of your brand. For example, Rothy uses referral discounts to encourage customers to spread the word and tell people about their brand.

Source

This phase should prioritize using existing customers to provide quality content to drive traffic and influence a larger audience. With that in mind, go ham on nurturing existing customer relationships, as they will, in turn, help grow your brand.

Bottom Line

A social media funnel is an effective way to engage your target audience and build trust around your brand.

It might get overwhelming at first, but it’s necessary to understand your customer persona to utilize this funnel fully. Also, keep track of your customer’s purchase journey to know what marketing content suits them at a particular stage of the funnel.

Again, every prospect can be a paying customer with the proper steps. Therefore, invest in brand awareness campaigns to get potential leads at the top of the funnel and nurture them all the way through. Provide value through the content you dish out at every stage while subtly positioning your brand as the solution for their problems.

By optimizing your social campaigns to fit your customer’s journey at every stage in the funnel, you don’t just create loyal customers, but a community of customers who also promote your brand to others.

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The post 11 Best IG Tools to Get More Followers, Engagement, & Sales appeared first on .

The advent of social media has connected people across the globe in a way that was never possible before. Over 57.6% of the world’s population uses social media, with around 13 new users every second.

Instagram alone has over a billion active users. It’s the second most popular social media platform for marketers and has a much higher engagement rate than Facebook. It allows marketers to focus on their visually appealing products and content to connect with customers better.

But posting and ghosting is not the way to go about on Instagram. You need to engage with your audience regularly with content that appeals to their interests, and doing this manually can get tedious and is unnecessarily time-consuming.

Good thing many Instagram tools can do the heavy lifting for you by automating tasks like scheduling posts, measuring analytics, creating stunning design templates for your content, and optimizing your profile for greater results.

However, with the overwhelming number of IG tools available online, it isn’t easy to decide which one you should go for. So we’ve picked some of the best tools to help you get started on your journey to a more seamless Instagram experience optimized for the results you desire.

11 best IG tools you should consider

Here are the best IG tools you should check out. We’ve covered the pros, cons, and more details.

1. Tailwind

Tailwind is mainly known for its ability to schedule Instagram posts, but it does a little bit of everything. It helps you plan your content ahead of time while also optimizing your content to get the best results. You can create incredible designs with ease. It also comes with an intelligent recommendation feature if you’re stumped for ideas.

It’s one of the most intuitive apps for curating your Instagram page. It’s your social media marketing team, and growth partner rolled into one neat little app.

The app (for Android and iOS) is easy to use, thanks to the simple visual interface. For creatives that often fall prey to writer’s block, caption templates in the app can be a lifesaver. All in all, it’s an excellent solution for small businesses and individuals.

Pros:

• Automatically publishes content at the optimal time
• Pre-made caption templates
• Instagram hashtag finder helps you quickly find hashtags
• In-built bio creator
• User-friendly interface

Cons:

• You can only schedule to one Instagram account with the Pro plan

Best suited for: Small businesses, startups, individuals

Pricing: You can get the essential tools to use for free for an unlimited period. The priced subscriptions offer more features and start with the Pro plan at $19.99/month. This is followed by the Advanced plan at $39.99/month and the Max plan at $79.99/month.

You might also want to check out our guide on how to use Tailwind to schedule to Instagram and Pinterest.

2. IconoSquare

Iconosquare is a great app that helps you understand your audience’s behaviors. It’s an Instagram analytics tool that’s perfect for the needs of medium to large-sized businesses looking to amp up their Instagram marketing processes.

The app displays IG post metrics in an easy-to-understand manner to help you analyze post-performance and tweak your strategy for better results. It also has some other stunning features like multi-profile management from a single dashboard, a highly intuitive post scheduler that recommends best posting times, and geolocation tagging.

Pros:

• Detail analysis for Instagram stories
• Tracks competitors
• Helps you figure out what drives engagement
• Creates detailed and simple performance reports

Cons:

• Filter options are difficult to navigate through
• Doesn’t differentiate clearly between promoted posts and organic ones
• Servers tend to lag in some regions of the world

Best suited for: Mid-size and larger businesses

Pricing: The Pro plan costs $49/month, while the Advanced plan costs $79/month. It has a third, Enterprise plan offered at a customized price per your requirement.

3. Canva

Canva has quickly gained popularity in the general marketing sphere due to its vast collection of templates and designs that are incredibly easy to use. It has template designs specifically for the dimensions of Instagram’s posts and stories, making it super convenient for you to create professionally-looking posts in minutes.

Its most unique template is the “carousel” for multi-photo posts, which gives an almost panoramic feel when swiping between photos.

Canva is entirely a content design platform where you can edit videos, icons, stories, and photos so that the dimensions fit perfectly in the social media app. The templates are also inspiring and helpful if you require a specific theme or layout.

It’s perfect for beginners that want to gain experience in designing attractive content that captures the brand image. Additionally, it’s also a budget-friendly tool that can easily be employed by small businesses or even freelance digital marketers. It recently added scheduling features that let you publish on Instagram.

Pros:

• Templates are easy to edit
• Create a color palette so you can stick to your brand’s theme
• Scheduler lets you directly schedule to Instagram business accounts and other social networks like LinkedIn and Tumblr
• Ideal for beginners who lack experience with editing software
• Create original stickers for your stories

Cons:

• Isn’t ideal for advanced editing
• Lacks vector designs
• The mobile app is not very precise and intuitive

Best suited for: Freelance digital marketers, small businesses, startups

Pricing: Canva’s free plan lets you use its free templates and elements to create content. The Pro plan comes at $12.99/month, while the Enterprise plan is offered at a customized price.

You might also want to check out our articles on Canva alternatives.

4. Kicksta

Instagram Tool, Kicksta promises more organic, genuine Instagram followers and engagement than random followers and spam accounts that clog the brand’s Instagram feed. It uses AI-powered technology to steer its users’ social media accounts in the right direction and get more followers and eyes to their profile—all while steering clear of bots and fake accounts.

Pros:

• Organic, targeted engagement
• Clear dashboard console with tabs for monitoring and analytics
• Functions without installing software
• Grow your Instagram following organically

Cons:

• Pricey enrollment fee
• Time-intensive process of establishing the followers’ list
• Lack of transparency in followers, hashtags, etc.
• Unpredictable growth rate

Best suited for:

• Brands that cater to a national or international audience rather than a local audience
• Kicksta can be used as a supplement to organic audience growth efforts by startups

Pricing: There are two pricing options available: the standard plan for $49 which includes “moderate” growth speed, video onboarding, and ten targets, and the premium plan for $99, which promises “maximum” growth speed, video onboarding, 40 targets, VIP email support, live chat support, advanced targeting, and a blacklist.

5. Agorapulse

Agorpulse is a one-stop platform for agencies that require social media coordination on a single dashboard. It combines features found on social media and project management platforms to truly bring a seamless collaboration experience to you and your team by providing all the features you need for end-to-end social media management.

It offers features similar to Hootsuite but in a way that would be more useful to agencies. The shared calendars and reporting tools are a great way to keep the team on track with your Instagram marketing agenda.

Pros:

• Shared calendars
• Assign user roles to include clients in the process
• Power Reports feature
• Filters negative comments and spam
• Social listening
• Unified social inbox

Cons:

• Lacks Instagram grid preview
• Difficult to reorder photos when scheduling a carousel post
• Can’t reschedule Instagram posts in the queue

Best suited for: Small to medium-sized digital marketing agencies

Pricing: Agorapulse offers four pricing plans: the free plan, the Pro plan at $79/month, the Premium plan at $259/month, and the customized Enterprise plan.

6. Hootsuite

A powerful social media management tool, Hootsuite handles everything from collecting user generated content, scheduling posts, and monitoring analytics to advertising your page. This all-in-one management platform is one of the most advanced IG tools with intuitive features which help you batch-create and schedule posts at the most optimal time for high engagement, listen to the latest social media conversations and create relevant content along with making brand-consumer engagement easier than ever.

The tool is ideal for larger businesses that need to handle multiple accounts and users across the organization. It also supports easy integration with major marketing apps online, helping you streamline your content plan across different platforms.

Pros:

• Super easy user interface
• Provides influencers suggestions to boost your conversions and followers
• Monitors comments, likes, and messages in one place
• Assign tasks to users

Cons:

• Difficulty tagging people in videos
• Doesn’t offer hashtag suggestions

Best suited for: Large businesses that would prefer integrating their social media with other marketing software

Pricing: The Professional plan costs $49/month, the Team plan costs $129/month, and the Business plan costs $599/month. A customized plan is also available under Enterprise.

7. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is an affordable Instagram management tool that doesn’t overwhelm you with shiny things. It’s extremely straightforward in its functioning and is simple to use with exciting functionality like pre-scheduling and batch-creating posts, content suggestions, and website-to-Instagram integrations.

The app is heaven-sent for solo entrepreneurs that want to grow their business quickly and efficiently by studying top-performing content and trends likely to get them more traction.

Pros:

• Easy set up and has a chatbot for assistance
• Schedules content to post at optimal times
• Daily reminders and suggestions to help your page grow
• Offers content pre-scheduling
• Lets you publish content to IG from your own blog or website

Cons:

• Mostly suggested content is by other Crowdfire users
• The dashboard gets overwhelming if you’re using multiple Instagram accounts
• Tends to attract the follow-for-follow crowd

Best suited for: Individual entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to grow their ventures effectively.

Pricing: Crowdfire offers a free plan besides monthly subscription plans. The Plus plan costs $9.99/month, the Premium plan is $49.99/month, and the VIP plan is $99.99/month.

8. SocialInsider

SocialInsider equips you with analytical tools that help you better understand your Instagram visitors and the algorithm. You can also use it for competitive analysis, to determine where you stand on the platform, get detailed reports about your Instagram performance and understand brand metrics.

If utilized well, the app can help you improve relationships with your current and potential customers and create the best content for your audience. It’s best suited for digital agencies that work across various industries.

Pros:

• Generates benchmark reports for Insta, TikTok, YouTube, and more networks
• Tracks competitor pages
• Monitors campaign performance

Cons:

• Expensive for its relatively limited features
• Not very useful for brands with a small following

Best suited for: Medium to large business and digital marketing agencies

Pricing: SocialInsider offers three pricing plans, starting with the Social Media Manage plan at $83/month, the Small Agency plan at $141/month, and the Agency plan is customized.

9. Keyhole

Keyhole is an industry-leading social listening and analytics tool along with an Instagram influencer marketing app. It’s used by Netflix, the BBC, and NBC, courtesy of its unique features and individually-vetted influencer suggestions, tailored for each business.

The social listening segment of the app lets you understand what your audience is talking about to give you a gist into potential content topics likely to get more eyes to your profile. It also analyzes your audience’s sentiment and gives you tone-based information, so you don’t send the right social media message at the wrong time.

On the other hand, the influencer marketing segment of the app helps you manage influencer campaigns seamlessly by assisting you end-to-end from influencer vetting to campaign reporting. You can also use the data to improve your influencer outreach campaigns.

Pros:

• In-depth profile analysis
• Real-time data
• Simplified influencer marketing
• Event marketing tool
• Sentiment analysis and social media listening

Cons:

• The interface can be complex at first
• An expensive investment

Best suited for: Medium to large companies that want to integrate influencer marketing into their campaigns

Pricing: Keyhole uses custom pricing for all its users. You can get in touch and discuss your requirements to determine the price point.

10. Smartly.io

Smartly.io brings automated marketing to your fingertips. You can enhance your Instagram advertising campaigns by viewing thousands of variations from a single ad idea and analyzing and using the one that’s likely to get you the best results. So, you can create, edit, and monitor your ad performance on social media—from a single dashboard with detailed reporting and Instagram insights.

It’s ideal for larger agencies that need to optimize ad performances for their clients. Smartly.io also comes with automated budget allocation and optimization, ensuring you get the best bang for your buck when it comes to ads.

Pros:

• Huge collection of templates for visuals
• Flexible payment options
• Generates thousands of ad variations
• A/B testing

Cons:

• The user interface takes some getting used to
• Very expensive

Best suited for: Established digital marketing agencies and media buyers that cater to clients looking for ad optimization

Pricing: Smartly.io charges a percentage fee on your total ad spending. The platform charges a flat fee of $5,645 for ad spending below $112,845. Beyond that, it charges 5% for spending up to $169,265. The percentage fee reduces by 0.5% after every additional $56,420 spent.

11. Buffer

Buffer is a social media management suite tool that helps you create, edit and manage your Instagram profile from one dashboard. It measures your social media performance in a single click to give you an overview of your growth and engagement over time, helps you collaborate with your teammates, and better optimize your campaigns. Most of all, it enables you to respond to comments at twice the speed.

It has a super intuitive interface and makes social media teams faster, smarter, and efficient in content creation, social media monitoring, and customer engagement for greater Instagram growth.

Pros:

• Powerful Instagram marketing tool with a clean user interface
• Pre-scheduling posts across multiple platforms including Instagram
• Organizing content
• Customizable posts across different platforms
• Easy posting—even in offline mode
• Seamless integration with WordPress, Pocket, etc

Cons:

• Specialized posts (for instance, carousel pictures) are not supported
• Doesn’t have features of viewing incoming mentions and messages

Best suited for: Bloggers, freelance social media managers, small businesses, and agencies with a versatile clientele base

Pricing:

• Buffer follows a freemium pricing model where you can connect up to three social media accounts with maximum scheduling of 10 posts

• The Pro plan costs $15/month and allows you to connect up to eight social media accounts with maximum scheduling of 100 posts

• The Premium plan costs $65/month and allows maximum scheduling of 2000 post

• For large brands, the Business plan costs $99/month and offers connection with up to 25 social media accounts, six users, and allows maximum scheduling of 2000 posts

Further, Buffer offers compartmentalization of features of Buffer such as analytics, community management, data insights, etc.

Did you find the best Instagram marketing tool?

Social media management tools are the key to keeping your business fresh during the age of mass consumption. They help you optimize your content and feed for a fraction of the cost in time and money.

Without them, you will likely need to invest in a large social media team to manually come up with ideas and analyze data at the same time to pick the optimal time to share that content. And even then, the performance would be relatively less due to error and subjectiveness.

Use this article to pick the best tool or a combination of tools for your Instagram needs, and give your team the features they need to truly grow your Instagram presence and take your brand to the next level with increased exposure and conversions.

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The post Should You Buy Social Media Followers? appeared first on .

It’s natural to want to jump to the end of a goal … to the point where you finally have what you were aiming for. Where you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Only … there’s no labor if you jump to the end, right?

From learning your target audience’s core needs to building efficient systems, cultivating a community and a strong business takes time.

Still, you may wonder if there are ways you can cut corners to get what you want.

And in this article, we’re going to shed some light on a particular shortcut brands are getting curious about.

We’re talking about buying social media followers. 

Let’s take a closer look at what it means to buy social media followers and whether it’s the right move for your business. We’ll also share six social media bonus tips you can take advantage of to grow your followers organically.

Ready to learn more?

Let’s get started.

What does buying social media followers mean?

Buying social media followers is pretty straightforward. It means that you find a vendor and purchase a list of followers from them. In return, the vendor is supposed to supply you with followers for the social media channel you selected.

Notice we said, “supposed to.”

Just because a vendor promises you followers, doesn’t mean they’ll deliver, as it all depends on your vendor evaluation process and the vendor you select. More on this in a bit.

Why do brands buy social media followers?

Brands buy social media followers to boost their following faster than organic or paid ads can.

But, what many don’t realize is that building a brand by buying social media followers comes with a host of consequences.

And that brings us to the big question …

Should you buy social media followers?

In short, the answer is no. You shouldn’t buy social media followers. 

Buying social media followers isn’t a regulated practice, nor does it produce authentic communities.

(Image Source)

In fact, there’s no way to know what kind of followers you’re getting when you make a purchase, regardless of what a vendor promises you.

Think of your social media followers the way you think of your friends. Would you appreciate having a large group of people in your life who said they were your friends but didn’t act like it?

The same is true for your business.

You want followers with whom you can build long-term customer relationships. You want followers who can provide you with genuine feedback about your business. You want followers who are authentic, believe in your business, and want to buy from you.

Let’s take a closer look at why you shouldn’t buy social media followers — and what to do instead.

6 reasons you shouldn’t buy social media followers (and what to do instead)

Buying social media followers can affect your credibility and may even get you banned from the platforms your business uses the most.

Here are six reasons you should forgo buying fake followers and how to grow authentically instead:

1. Purchased followers don’t reflect your brand’s true target audience

Your ideal audience has a diverse array of qualities that no number of purchased followers could have.

Why? Because you attract your target audience through different digital marketing channels like organic marketing or paid campaigns.

In other words, when you ask for the business via orchestrated campaigns or organic marketing, your target audience will flock to you. Especially, if you provide consistent value on social media.

When you buy the business, you’ll receive a random group of people who may or may not align with your brand vision. You may even receive followers who harm your brand.

Instead of buying social media followers, analyze your prospects to understand how they stack up against your ideal client. Insights like these provide you with high data quality for lead scoring so you can pinpoint which prospects are aligned.

In other words, instead of buying followers, score your leads to see which prospects have the best chance of converting and becoming long-term customers.

2. Social media platforms purge fake social media followers

Increasingly more social media platforms are becoming better at spotting fake social media followers and purging them from the system.

Some platforms are even going as far as removing fake likes and comments, so even if you receive engagement from your purchased followers, it may not matter.

Instead of buying fake followers, focus on making social media algorithms work for you. Learn what the latest trends are and what the algorithm favors.

For instance, Instagram currently favors Reels over other types of posts. Posting Reels is a simple way to attract more eyes to your social media pages without having to sacrifice your integrity. You just need to be consistent in posting Reels on social media. But there are social media tools to help you stay consistent and engaged with your followers.

3. You could get banned from social media platforms

On top of having your fake followers removed, social media channels may ban you from using their platforms if you purchase followers.

Social media platforms may flag your account as fake and issue a violation for not following their terms of use. If other social media users suspect you have fake followers, they can also report your account and/or posts.

(Image Source)

Again, buying social media followers isn’t regulated, so there’s no way to protect your accounts against fraud, scammers, spam, or worse. Since social media platforms are aware of this, they’ve adjusted their terms of use to reflect a zero-tolerance policy toward fake profiles.

Instead of purchasing followers, focus on building real relationships with your social media community.

Get to know who your audience is on a micro-level. Why do they appreciate your brand? How has your brand helped them? How can your brand continue to help them? What do they need and value?

4. Fake followers wreak havoc on engagement rates

There are two main ways fake followers can wreak havoc on engagement rates.

For one, fake followers may never engage with your content which will naturally lower your engagement rates.

And for two, fake followers can deter other accounts from following you.

Why?

Have you ever seen an account with high followers but little to no comments? Didn’t you feel a bit suspicious about that account’s authenticity? You see where we’re going with this.

Instead of relying on purchased followers to increase engagement, focus on publishing personalized, interactive content. Reels, how-to videos, giveaways, and even thought leadership Twitter screenshots can help you attract followers that convert.

5. Purchased followers may spam your account

Cybercriminals are known for hiding their real identities behind fake profiles and may even appear to be trusted sources.

Even if the vendor you purchased followers from is legitimate, the followers they provided you with may not be.

Here’s just the start of what can happen if you get involved with a vendor or with followers who participate in cyber crimes:

• You and/or your followers may be tricked out of money
• You might end up spamming your real followers unintentionally
• Your followers or vendor may hack your social media accounts to conduct cybercrimes
• You might get banned from social media platforms

Instead of buying followers, use a social media cleaning tool to remove fake or spammy accounts and analyze the quality of followers you have.

(Image Source)

A social media cleaning tool can also help you identify inactive accounts or ghost profiles so you can remove them and focus on obtaining legitimate followers instead.

6. You could get scammed

Piggybacking on our previous point, even if a vendor looks legitimate, you can still get scammed.

Why?

Oftentimes, vendors require payment before they’ll hand over any followers. After you submit your payment, there’s no way to know if the vendor will deliver on their promise.

To make matters worse, fake followers are expensive, which means you could be scammed out of quite a bit of money.

Instead of buying followers, focus on building authentic relationships with professionals in your industry.

Once you’ve established relationships, consider who might be a good fit to collaborate with on joint campaigns. Locking arms with quality professionals to host giveaways, contests, and sponsored posts can help you bring in more followers — without having to sacrifice your integrity and account safety to do so.

Wrap up

If you’ve made it this far, then you know that buying social media followers isn’t a good idea for your business.

Instead of looking for a shortcut, commit to nurturing and growing an audience authentically. Build a real community with your followers and show them that you value their needs and care about solving their problems. Over time, you’ll have strong followers that know and trust you.

And that’s it. We hope this article has inspired you to foster an authentic social media community you can nurture for years to come.
Did you like this article? Then you’ll love our blog. Head on over to devour more social media tips like these.

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