We often talk about buying followers and whether or not it is safe to do so.
My argument is that it is really safe to buy Twitter followers and that with the right kind of investment; these followers can be real and valuable to your brand.
However, the world of buying followers is full of traps and other pitfalls, and it’s easy to get hooked by a scammer with a legitimate-sounding offer, only to waste your money on well-crafted bots.
Should you buy followers?
If you want to buy followers, you need to analyze the reason why. Why would you want to spend money on followers directly, instead of growing them organically?
Good reasons:
• You want to supplement organic growth. Buying followers the right way isn’t necessarily cheap – although it can be – but it can certainly grow your audience in a legitimate way. It’s the difference between getting 10 followers this week or getting 15. With real followers, once they’re part of your audience, there’s no way to tell an organic follower from a paid follower.
• You want higher numbers. Twitter follower count may be important, but you’ll probably never buy your way to millions of followers. However, it’s also perfectly reasonable to run a business with a few thousand followers at most.
• You’re running engagement experiments. You might even want to buy fake followers to see what kind of results you get, but you need to be aware that you’re not getting good followers from doing so. This is the kind of thing you do on a test account to present a case study later.
• You understand that “buying legitimate followers” is synonymous with running follower-based advertising campaigns. That’s really all we’re talking about here. Running ads with the intention of getting more followers is legitimate; buying them by the thousands from Fiverr probably isn’t.
So yes, you can buy legitimate followers, but you need to be aware of two main things. First, if you want them to be legitimate, they won’t be cheap. Second, if you want them to be valuable, you usually won’t have a lot of them.
You’re paying money to speed up the organic growth process, but you can’t bypass it entirely. This also means you’ll still need to maintain the basic principles of organic growth.
That is, you need to provide valuable content regularly so that users have something to gravitate towards and something they want to follow.
In short, you need to be prepared to spend money and be aware that your growth will not be, let’s say, explosive. If you’re looking for shortcuts, you’ll be disappointed.
When real followers are fake
I mentioned these above, but sometimes real followers aren’t all that real. People will often follow you simply fishing for reciprocal followback. They want to build their own following by abusing the reciprocal attitude that is slowly dying on Twitter. It still works, but it means that these accounts will end up with something like 95k followers and 96k people they follow.
Geographical concerns and concerns about interest also fall into this category. When a user follows you, you want them to be interested in you and potentially interested in purchasing your product or service. If they aren’t going to bring you any benefit, they aren’t a great follower.
Now, some followers will have absolutely no intention of buying, but will happily follow you and retweet your content. This engagement is still better than nothing, and these followers may be worth buying, albeit at a lower cost than the followers you want with intention of buying.
This effect turns real people who follow you because of your content into potentially “fake” followers, but you shouldn’t confuse these people with followers who are actually bots. It’s usually pretty easy to tell the difference, in any case.
How to buy real and legitimate followers
There are a number of different ways to buy Twitter followers, but the best ones usually revolve around advertising. You’re either paying for or running ads on Twitter, or you’re paying someone else to run ads for you, either through Twitter’s ad system or through their own ad networks.
Let’s start with the “less legitimate” of the two, which are the vendors who essentially just outsource advertising. These people will advertise your content and brand through their own ad networks, and these ad networks vary as much as the vendors. Some people have networks of Twitter followers, and they will show you to their followers in an attempt to get more followers. This tends to be cheap, but also pretty ineffective. They may also work through ad networks on websites, like Google Ads or one of the many third-party ad networks.
The other alternative is to simply run Twitter ads. Twitter ads can be run with a very low investment, but you really need to understand your existing audience and the audience you want to attract. This is so that you can understand the types of ads you run, the types of people you attract with those ads, and the types of people you want to target.
Unfortunately, Twitter ads aren’t as robust as Facebook ads when it comes to targeting. You have more limitations, less information to work with, and less room to create a compelling ad. You have to work with what you’re given, though, and Twitter’s native ad platform is the best place to reach Twitter users. Anywhere else, and your Twitter-centric ads could be reaching people who don’t have or use Twitter.
