Transcript
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Hi. Welcome to Marketing without Judgment. If you don’t know me, my name is Megan Brame. I’m a 5x award-winning advanced Digital Marketing strategist and I help business owners create ride or die fans for life. I wanted to start this new series to answer all all of the marketing questions that tend to be a little controversial or people are afraid to ask.
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I have no judgment. I’m just here to help you. So if you have a question, leave a comment below and I will make a video like this for you. But the first one I want to talk about is vanity numbers. Is it worth it to buy fake followers for your social media accounts?
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What generally is told to people is that it’s not a good idea because it messes with the algorithm and people aren’t really paying attention to vanity numbers anymore. But I don’t find that to be true. I think that if you go to an Instagram account and you see they have 50,000 followers, then automatically you’re like, “okay, maybe they know what they’re talking about.” But if you go to someone that has 300 followers, there’s a different balance and a power structure that just we as humans are looking for social proof. And the first instinct for that is by seeing how many other people believe this person to be credible.
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So say you want to buy 20,000 followers. Now the one side of it is, yes, you will probably get a little bit of a bump when people recognize you or when people recognize the value that you have because you have these 20,000 followers. However. When you start getting into people who want to buy from you, thats when it starts to get a little bit more nuanced and many people will start looking at how many likes do your posts get.
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How many comments do your post get. How often am I seeing your post or anybody responding when that 20,000 followers doesn’t match a reasonable amount of comments. Likes and engagement. Then that’s when people start getting a little sketchy and start thinking, “I don’t know if this person actually knows what they’re talking about” and it can actually backfire.
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So buying those 20,000 followers for a surface level is a valid reason. But once you start to get to people who want to buy from you, it gets a little bit sketchy and you lose that trust. So should you buy followers? It’s up to you. If you are going to buy followers, I recommend that you don’t get the cheapest ones possible.
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Get the ones that have a couple of posts or followers or things like the ones that look like actual people. Don’t just get the ones with just the default icon and things like that because that’s going to be they’re going to see right through you with that. If you can get ones that look a little bit more realistic, I think you’ll have a better shot. Now what do those run? I don’t know, to be honest.
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I think that followers will usually run anywhere from like one cent to a dollar maybe. I think it depends on the quality and the amount and things like that. But you got to do what you got to do for your business. Will it mess up your reach in the algorithms? Absolutely.
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But if you don’t care about that and you just kind of want to show that you have street cred in the beginning or you want to make people feel safer to follow you or things like that, then go for it. Buy more followers. If you do that, keep in mind that those are violations of terms of service for a lot of social media accounts, a lot of social media platforms. So if you do it, keep in mind if they find out, you’ll be kicked off or shadow banned. I don’t know.
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In my opinion, the cost-benefit of it probably not the best, but if you feel like you need that number, you need that number. Just go into it with your eyes open and realize that, one, vanity numbers are only good for the surface level. They’ll actually mess up your algorithm and your analytics. Two, once people start seeing your post and following you, they’re going to dive a little bit deeper into your social media accounts because they want to hit that know, like and trust that’s a sales funnel that just makes instant conversions. It’s so much easier than trying to just bring everybody in.
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So once they get into that “know” phase and then “like” phase, they want to buy from you, and so they start doing a little more digging and see that you have these fake followers that might work against you. So that’s my thoughts on fake followers. You do what you got to do. Keep in mind that for the long haul, it’s probably not a good strategy, but I hope that was helpful. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on fake followers.
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And like I said, if you have any questions, leave a comment and I will make a video like this for you. I will see you guys later.
