5 Reasons Influencers Shouldn't Use Fake Followers

In this new world of influencer marketing, more often than not, influencers get stuck focusing on their follower and like counts than on their actual ability to influence their audience. Although it may be tempting to boost your numbers and buy fake followers, here are five reasons why influencers shouldn’t:

1. Fake Followers Don’t Engage With Your Account.

There are two types of fake followers once can come across. The first is the type of follower that takes a small sum of money in return for going on a Fake Followers list where then he or she will be added to thousands of accounts. They will most likely never engage with your account.

The second type of fake follower is a “bot” that may be programmed to make automated, unmeaningful comments on your posts. Although this may appear as a quick solution to a slow-growing account, this bot merely acts as a piece of code that won’t organically grow your audience.

As an influencer, it is entirely pointless to build a large network of followers if you cannot influence them to either buy a product, click on a link, share a post, etc. Influencers should focus more of their time and energy on learning how to optimize their engagements with their audience and less on how to maintain an “acceptable” follower-to-following ratio.

2. Having Fake Followers Destroys Your Credibility — And As An Influencer, Your Credibility/Reputation is Everything.

People who notice that an influencer is using fake followers may doubt his/her credibility as an honest influencer or business. As an influencer, the most effective and long-lasting way to grow one’s brand is to have your current audience share and repost your content, and a follower is less willing to do so if he/she suspects that what that influencer chooses to promote isn’t authentic.

3. You Can’t Make Money Off Of Fake Followers.

These fake followers will not spend any money on you or share your account to new followers. None of these followers will go to your account and buy your product.

Brands go beyond just looking at our follower-count, so it is important to make sure that you are taking the time to grow loyal and honest followers who are willing to buy your promoted products.

4. Fake Followers Advertise False Numbers To Possible Brands You Might Work With.

Nowadays, more and more brands/advertisers are focusing on spending their time and money on “micro-influencers” due to their effectiveness in influencing their smaller audiences. These influencers tend to have anywhere between 1,000-100,000 followers, and they typically have a niche topic or speciality that they focus their brand on.

As opposed to big-name celebrities, brands are more willing to spend their money with a micro-influencer who has less followers but is able to engage 60% of his/her audience than a mega-influencer who only engages 1% or less of their followers.

Once an influencer starts building a fake network of followers, he/she automatically becomes less appealing to most brands and distorts his/her performance metrics.

5. You Risk Your Comment Section Being Flooded With Inappropriate/Spam Messages.

Your comment section can be flooded with irrelevant or even inappropriate messages that are often easy to detect as ingenuine. In general, you want your comment section to match the mood of your post, but there’s no way in ensuring that these bot accounts will leave appropriate messages.

If you’re thinking about buying fake followers, don’t. Instead, put in the time and effort you would spend in buying fake followers to learn how to organically grow your audience. Becoming an influencer does not happen overnight, so it is easy to get frustrated when you don’t see immediate results. Just remember to be patient with yourself and trust that your hard work will eventually pay off.

Happy snipping!