Why Buying Instagram Followers is a Really Bad Idea

How many times have you seen somebody pushing you to buy Instagram followers cheaply? To somebody hoping to make it as an influencer, it must be tempting; an easy way to boost your Instagram clout without having to work for it. But as with most things in life, there is a catch. Bought Instagram followers are not the same as the followers you genuinely earn through the quality of your posts. Indeed, buying Instagram followers can lead to quite a few problems, and shred your online reputation at the same time.

There are two main types of fake Instagram followers. The first is the follower who has agreed to take a small sum of money in return for going on a Fake Follower list. They let someone add them as a follower to thousands of people they don’t know and have no interest in. They will happily pocket what money they can, but they certainly won’t take any interest in the accounts that they “follow.” They will never look at your posts or engage with you in any way.

The second type of fake follower isn’t a real person. “He” is a bot – merely a piece of code masquerading as an Instagram follower. In theory, some bots do engage – they make automated, often nonsensical, comments, on some of your posts. But these mean nothing. These followers definitely don’t engage with any thought – they may be some form of AI, but there is no deep learning involved. They are unlikely to be programmed to learn from your content. And even if they were, is that what social engagement is all about?

What is the point of a follower on Instagram, or any other social network, if he/she doesn’t engage? The whole reason that these online hubs are called social networks is that they are platforms for people to be social.

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Your Engagement is Mismatched

Human beings are relatively predictable creatures. No matter how important you are, your genuine human followers will most likely follow a relatively typical pattern of engagement. Admittedly, larger accounts receive less engagement than smaller accounts, but there is still a general pattern:

• < 1,000 followers average about 8% engagement
• 1,000 – 10,000 followers average 4% engagement
• 10,000 – 100,000 followers average 2.4% engagement
• 100,000 – 1 million followers average 1.8% engagement
• > 1 million followers average 1.7% engagement
• Buy any Instagram Followers

Your engagement rates won’t match these numbers exactly – they are just averages - but they should be in the general vicinity of these percentages.

If you have fake followers, however, your engagement will be noticeably different from these averages. Your fake followers will generally not be engaging in any way – and this will drag your engagement rate down.

One thing you should check out, though, is any “useless comment” type of engagement. The people who sell fake followers have recognized this engagement problem, and some of them now have bots making fake, but useless, comments, to boost engagement rates. If you see that somebody just makes “nice picture” type comments you can make a safe assumption that they are a fake Instagram follower.