Buying Social Media Followers Is a Bad Business Move: I’ll Tell You Why

While having hundreds of fake followers might make your business appear popular at first, this popularity won’t be reflected in your audience engagement rates. Purchased followers often consist of bot or inactive accounts, so they can’t give you organic engagement in the form of comments, clicks, saves, or shares.

On platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, engagement metrics like watches or saves are much more important than your follower count, since these metrics feed into the algorithm and can help your content reach more people.

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Let’s imagine that only 30% of your Instagram followers are real, while the other 70% of your followers are fake. How might this impact your data? If you’re trying to get a clear understanding of your overall engagement levels, these fake followers can make it difficult to measure how real users are interacting with your content. 

So, if you’d like to accurately interpret your social media data, avoid buying followers at all costs. Since fake followers will distort your data, you’ll have a hard time working out what content audiences are engaging with the most. This leads to poor decision-making too, since your future content choices will be based on skewed data.

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Most social media platforms take fake followers very seriously. For example, Meta will penalize Facebook and Instagram accounts that’ve purchased followers. It’s deemed as “inauthentic behavior” according to the Community Standards and, if it’s discovered that you’ve purchased fake followers, could lead to your account being taken down completely.

To build trust and credibility with your audience and potential partners, buying social media followers is the last thing that you should do. If it’s made public that most of your followers are purchased, you risk damaging customer relationships and ruining your reputation online. 

In 2025, it’s easier than ever to work out which accounts have fake followers, mainly due to the free tools available and increased knowledge of fake accounts among consumers. Audiences value authenticity and transparency from brands, so it’s up to your business to act in good faith and avoid indulging in any dubious tactics that could tarnish your name.

While buying fake followers sounds like an easy way to make your business appear established and sought-after online, doing so can lead to more problems than solutions. This long list of problems includes decreased engagement, distorted social media data, account suspension, and poor brand credibility.

This is why I recommend focusing on producing a strong, long-term social media strategy instead. For example, posting high-quality content to the right social media accounts, interacting with your audience, and tweaking upcoming posts based on how users are currently engaging with your content. Though results won’t be instant, the effort you put in contributes to a strong foundation that’ll help you drive better growth in the future.