Should You Buy Twitter Followers

Many marketers are buying Twitter fans to boost their marketing with Twitter. While there are several of them that reported success in their campaign, some also regret the move because their sites were eventually banned from the SERPS. Which of the two groups should you follow? Search engines and SEO experts discourage buying Twitter followers, yet many companies and even a couple of well-known brands keep on doing it under the radar of Google. Should you buy Twitter followers, as well?

To better assess the situation and come up with a smart choice, it would be great to have a 360-degree view of each option. Along that line, finding out the pros and cons of buying fans in Twitter can help you make the right decision.

Pros of Buying Followers in Twitter

There are numerous benefits of having a lot of Twitter fans. It is now treated as a symbol of trust and popularity. It’s a fact that having more fans can give you a significant edge over your competitors. It transforms amateurs into professionals, novices into seemingly experts, and wannabes into people with authority. In fact, some individuals were invited to job interviews just because they have a lot of followers in Twitter, and hiring companies think that their voices are influential.

The size of your fanbase in Twitter reflects the extent of your online presence, and this is one of the key success drivers of online marketing. It is for this very reason why people are taking the faster route of amassing fans in order to accelerate their journey to online success.

Unless you will check each fan one-by-one of one particular famous Twitter user, which is by the way quite tedious and impractical if there are thousands to millions of fans, it is hard to tell if all fans are genuine. Majority of the people don’t have enough time to dig through each follower. The bottom line is still the figure of the total fan base, and that’s all that matters for them to decide if the person is influential or not.

Aside from that, the Physics principle that states like matter attracts like matter also applies here. Having more fans can attract more fans. People will be curious as to why a certain user is quite popular, and one way to find that out is to start following that person.

Because of the perceived influence of the individual with massive followers, others will also trust the person and start to follow. So even if some or majority of your followers are fake, people don’t bother to check that anymore. The fact that there are a lot of people following you, that’s all that matters to them to quickly jump into conclusion that you must be someone influential that can be trusted.

Take for instance, a person with only 10 Twitter fans writes about how to lose weight in 14 days, while another individual with 5000 followers writes an article on the same topic. Which of the two will you trust? It’s quite obvious, you will more likely to trust the one with numerous fans. There seems to be behavioral psychology at play behind this. So, in spite of the red warning signs of Google, many people will keep on buying fans because of the potential rewards.

 

Cons of Purchasing Twitter Fans

While there are rewards, there are also risks in buying fans not just in Twitter but also in other social networks such as Facebook. Sooner or later, you will eventually be cornered, and you have no way out but to walk your talk and prove that you truly are what your fans thought of.

If they think you are an expert in health because of your massive followers, then you have to show to them that you truly are an authority in this niche. Eventually, people will find out your authenticity or lie. If you fall behind their expectations, some will eventually start to unfollow you and, to some extent, tag you as spam.

Aside from that, some services will not give you genuine accounts but fake followers. This means, your followers are not real people but made only to follow Twitter users because they were paid to do so. These fake accounts don’t socially engage, they don’t like posts, and they don’t share and retweet your tweets. You can easily detect them by simply checking their activities, which is zero or none at all.

If your main goal of getting fans is to capture prospects for conversion into customers, then don’t expect that you can get sales from fake followers because they are no people behind those accounts. You cannot also expect that your tweeted contents will go viral because fake followers will definitely not going to retweet your tweets. Your engagement with non-authentic followers will be zero, thereby making your Twitter marketing activities redundant.

Moreover, there are also SEO implications of having many paid followers in Twitter. Google is in all out war against buying social media fans and those who are caught will face severe consequences in search engine visibility. Depending on the severity of the case, some lost their Google PageRank, others lost their high ranking position in the SERPs. In worst case scenario, other blogs were eventually banned by Google and lost their visibility from the SERPS.

What is the Best Choice for You?

The best way to get more Twitter fans is to use the natural method. Attract people to follow you because of the supreme quality of your tweets and of your shared contents. You can also get more fans by regularly engaging with the other users, by following influential people, and by retweeting their tweets, among others.

Obviously, the natural means will eat up a lot of your time and consume your efforts. It will also take time to achieve your desired level of fan base. You can opt to buy a few thousand followers just to build a name and to create an authority image in the Twitter community. This will attract more genuine fans. And if you keep on engaging with your authentic followers, you will get more fans in the future.