Buying fake followers, likes, views, subscribers is always so sexy. It’s easy to get lured in by the ego boost it gives you, and there are a lot of short term benefits. In my conversation and observation, it never ends well in a long-term window and is the worst thing to spend your money on. Why?
It Doesn’t Move The Needle In The Long Term.
While it can be a very small positive to appear more popular to get booked for a gig or land a project, you’ll be exposed in the end when that project comes out and your “following” isn’t supporting it. Imagine getting hired and paid for a feature because you have 100K IG followers and you buy likes constantly. Cool, that will work and you’ll get that check up front, but when it’s released you’re going to have to buy likes on that release post, and then the client is going to wonder why so few people actually interact, and eventually they will figure it out. What a sour taste to leave in their mouth!
It Burns Bridges.
Now that you have a client who is suspicious of you and your social media practices, you just burned an important bridge that could have been a lifelong relationship because you were far more concerned about getting a little more money for an initial project than being honest and letting the merit of your work speak for itself. While I hate to use this overused cliche, your network is your net worth, so doing your best to maintain positive relationships for collabs and clients is crucial when starting out.
It’s A Vicious Circle You Can’t Stop.
Through conversations I’ve had with people who either actively do or used to buy their likes or followers, they’ve all said the same thing: stopping is near impossible. In a world of algorithms, once Instagram sees your posts go from 100 likes a photo to 2,000 per photo for 2 months, seeing a drastic drop off plays very poorly into the algorithm by signaling that the content must be bad as it’s getting very low like counts. So the creator is left with 2 options:
1 – Stop buying likes and have Instagram limit your reach to even a smaller percentage of real followers as the algorithm thinks your content got substantially worse, or
2 – Keep buying likes so you can keep up the illusion in IG’s eyes, and keep having “super engaging” bought interaction so your real followers will see it more.
It’s A Straight Up Lie.
Is that what you want to be associated with your personal or music brand? Being that person who buys their likes all the time? I don’t think that’s really the vibe a lot of people want to be associated with. It’s honestly not hard to tell, and I made a 10-minute video detailing ways to be able to tell which of the people in your circle are buying some form of their following. Check it out here!
JOHN MCLUCAS
John McLucas is a full-time pop/rock music producer, mixing engineer, and content creator in Los Angeles California. He’s worked with professionals from all corners of the music industry, including Grammy Winning Engineer Dennis MacKay (Judas Priest, George Martin, David Bowie), Joey Sturgis Tones, Unstoppable Recording Machine, and Oculus VR. His strength is in coming up with unique creative concepts in both audio and visual mediums for his clients, corporate and personal.
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