Purchased Instagram followers: How they negatively impact your growth

The question of whether one should buy followers for Instagram is widespread. Many users seek quick solutions to increase their reach and visibility. However, appearances can be deceiving: Purchased followers generally bring more disadvantages than benefits. In this guide, you will learn why buying followers is not a wise strategy and what negative consequences are associated with it.

Key Insights

• Purchased followers do not generate real engagement.
• The target audience often consists of fake accounts or irrelevant audience.
• Buying followers can lead to a violation of Instagram guidelines.
• If you want to maintain your credibility, there are better alternatives.

Why You Shouldn't Buy Anything: Engagement and Reach

The first and crucial point against buying followers is the lack of engagement. When you buy any number of followers for 100 €, you mostly get bots or fake accounts that do not interact with your content. These accounts may look good, but they negatively affect your like and comment numbers.

Why is this problematic? If your like-to-follow ratio is poor, you can hardly achieve organic reach. For example, before buying 500 followers, if you had 1000 followers and 100 likes, it had a ratio of 10%. However, if you buy 500 followers without a significant increase in likes, this ratio drops drastically. This can be seen as a negative signal to Instagram's algorithm.

Target Audience and Quality of Followers: A Critical Aspect

Another aspect to consider is the quality of your followers. Purchased followers often do not belong to an audience interested in your offer. So, if you are a German-speaking account, do not expect Indian bots to interact with your German content. These fake accounts will quickly unfollow, further reducing your engagement and ultimately your visibility on the platform.

If you want to receive genuine sponsorship requests, you need to provide your insights data, such as the origin of your followers and their average age. Purchased followers that do not match your target audience will skew your statistics and may ruin potential business opportunities for you.

The Dangers of Buying Followers: Violation of Guidelines

Another significant reason why you should not buy followers is that it violates Instagram's terms of use. Instagram actively monitors accounts that buy followers or try to increase their reach through other unethical means. There is a risk that your account will be temporarily or permanently suspended.

Such a suspension has drastic consequences. Not only could you lose your account, but your name would also be "burned" for any future Instagram presence. Therefore, resorting to this strategy is extremely risky.

How to Authentically Boost Your Growth

Instead of feeling pressured to buy followers, focus on organic growth instead. Authentic reach is ultimately much more valuable than just a mere number. Here are some tips that can help you gain more genuine followers:

• Change your hashtags: Experiment with different hashtags to reach new audiences.

• Optimize your content: Change the formatting and description of your posts to better engage users.

• Truly engage: Interact with your community, comment, and respond to their content.

Overall, it is much more valuable to grow authentically than to artificially inflate your reach.

Summary

Buying followers may seem tempting at first glance, but in practice, it leads to a variety of issues. Purchased followers do not generate engagement, do not add real value to your reach, and can even jeopardize your account. Therefore, make sure to grow organically instead of making the wrong decisions in hopes of quick success.