There are a number of overseas companies that offer Instagram follower services for a very affordable rate. Some as low as $10 USD. When you buy into this offering, thousands of different fake accounts and bots will follow your account.
You aren’t buying fake potential customers - you are buying fake accounts. Let me tell you something, Instagram does not like that.
In certain situations your account can be deactivated + flagged when too many of these false accounts follow you. Aka - your account could get shut down or 'disabled' for an extended period of time.
In fact, our account got shut down for an entire week. Yup - you read that right and we will give you the deets.
As Lash Artists may know, we already have fake or supplier accounts following us on the regular whether we like it or not. At Lashin Out, our social media manager regularly goes in and unfollows these accounts, follows more real accounts and blocks any accounts that are getting out of hand. Well, we unfollowed + followed too many in one hour and couldn’t post anything for a week.
Here are some tips to keep in mind.
Within one hour: do not unfollow or follow more than 60 people
For new accounts: do not follow/unfollow more than 50 people per day
For old accounts: do not follow/unfollow more than 150 people per day
Not only that but Instagram monitors fake accounts and often gets rid of them entirely. Meaning, you may very likely end of loosing these followers faster than you think.
Okay so, maybe you are reading all this and thinking “I don’t care. I still want to do it”. Well Miss.Rebel, here are a few more things to consider.
Buying followers is NOT buying potential customers. Your little dirty secret will be revealed in one way or another. Honestly, it isn’t difficult to discover who bought their followers because all of them will look fake and sometimes even inappropriate.
Fake followers typically never engage with your account. Engagement is key now a days. Likes are of the past and ‘bookmarks/shares’ are the new golden conversion.
That brings us to 3 things you should be doing instead.
- Reels. We have talked about this quite a bit and truly do practice what we preach. Reels can get you 30% more exposure than any other version of a post. Instagram has enabled this to get more reach because it is a new feature and they want people to be utilizing it! *beware - posting TikToks as reels might be tempting but it will hurt your ability to get a greater reach.
- Follow 5 accounts a day who you think might be a potential customer. This is a great way to catch someones attention by following them but keep in mind this does take more effort. At the same time you will need to unfollow accounts who do not engage with you anymore or don’t follow you back. There seems to be an unwritten rule that says: when you follow more people than who follow you - it looks tacky. Remember that.
- Last but not least. Work with the platform, not against it. Instagram is a beast, a powerful tool that is constantly changing. Engage with all the ways you can post. Stories, Product catalogues, Reels, IGTV, Lives. This world is your digital Oyster! If all this sounds like zero fun at all, consider hiring a social media manager. If you can’t afford to source this out consider putting your money towards a social media management system like Later or Tailwind. Two of our favs ;)
