Considering Purchasing Twitter Followers or Facebook Likes? I Wouldn’t.
There are plenty of services out there where you can purchase Twitter Followers or Facebook Likes. They cost between $50 – $3500 and you get some number of promised Twitter followers or new Likes on your Facebook page. When all is said and done, you end up with what, at a glance, appears to be a successful social media presence…and that’s the whole point, to make it seem like you’re someone who’s worthy of 1000s of likes and followers.
The thing is, you’re not. You very well may have content that will one day make you worthy of such a following, however when you’re just starting out, you don’t have that clout. You’re essentially scamming the system, degrading its overall worth and doing your own little part to ruin the web. You’re no better than a SPAMMER, because you’re taking what should be a fair trade of equity in the social networks and demeaning it to just another inflated Wall Street. You are, essentially, a Big Bank, screwing over everyone else who’s actually worked to earn their followings.
Beyond my little moral tirade there, there is actually a real downside to this as well. Sure, you have 25,000 Twitter Followers, but the vast majority of them will be bullshit; fake users, and therefore fake followers, that the companies use to inflate the numbers as well as attract actual users. You’re not actually getting that many people who are going to see any of your messages, but a mere fraction of that. Anyone interested enough in you to take a quick peek through your Tweeps will see that you have a bunch of spammy robots following you. This will likely give them cause to leave, particularly if your content doesn’t end up holding up once the real humans start tuning into your messages.
You’re then left with 10,000 followers who aren’t real people, making tweeting a completely pointless exercise, not to mention that you’ll never truly have a handle on how many actual users you’re reaching, because unless you take days and days worth of time analyzing who’s real and who isn’t and trying to block them, you’ll never get a solid count on your followers.
This all applies to Facebook as well.
But don’t take my word for it, spend your money, watch the numbers grow, and then watch them level off immediately, only to drop by a few hundred or so (the actual people you paid someone to trick into following you).
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