Have you ever looked at your social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and wondered why none of your posts, videos, or music tracks have gone viral?
Have you ever turned green with envy when you see someone else with an inferior product bragging about having tens of thousands of followers?
If you’re trying to monetize your accounts to make a living off them, it becomes more than just emotions, it becomes a matter of survival. Accounts with no followers don’t generate enough revenue to pay for a candy bar, let alone the mortgage.
The answer may be to buy online followers. I know … but before you freak out, let’s study it a bit; you may just change your mind.
Selling Followers
You can’t buy followers unless you can find a place on the web that’s selling them; and there are companies out there that promise live users rather than robots — or “bots” as they’re better known.
They pay their users in bitcoins, or occasionally, real money to “like” and comment on various pages. Although they may not actually like your product or page, these are real people using real accounts, not zombies. This means their posts and comments on your page can’t be filtered out as fakes. Since there is plenty of third-party software available to do just that or detect fake accounts, this gives you a tremendous leg up on the competition in your field.
How Much For That Song?
It’s been a long time since the Beatles’ “White Album” came out and the rules of the music industry have changed too much since then that it’s become a legitimate, and hard to answer question to ask: “What’s the value of that song?”
You may have written and recorded the best song since Abbey Road, or bought it from the artist, but unless people like it and buy it, the value of it is precisely … zero.
So much for that investment.
What you want is for people to tell all their friends and family that your song is one of the best things they ever bought. As we all know, business generates more business. No one wants to eat in an empty restaurant or be the first to buy a new song. There are a few outliers of course, but most people follow the herd.
Pros and Cons
Buying followers is an investment and all investments have their risks; like any investment, they also have their pros and cons. Let’s take a minute to examine them, starting with the cons.
Reasons Not to Buy Followers
Businesses live and die by the numbers, but to paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some numbers are more equal than others. Here is an example of why not to buy followers.
If you have 30,000 paid followers:
- How many of them engage you regularly?
- How many lists have they added you to? On Twitter? Pages on Facebook?
- How many actual leads and sales are they generating?
- How much traffic are they driving to your website(s)?
Your account might look good to the occasional visitor at first glance, they’ll soon notice that none of your umpteen gazillion followers are actually saying anything other than a generic “Great!”or “Love it!”
The herd mentality may be real but so is the distaste for phonies. People can spot them from a mile away, and pretty soon they’ll let their friends and families know to avoid you — exactly the result you don’t want.
Reasons to Buy Followers
In spite of all of the above, if you can purchase a social media entourage of real people, there are some definite advantages to buying followers.
First of all, you’ll increase your general visibility online. Any social media page that has thousands of followers will attract attention. Some of it will be the stop by and see what the buzz is about type that is here today and gone tomorrow. But the others may be the ones that will do more.
If they see active users engaging with you (and you responding back!), if they see real comments, even weird off-the-wall ones, and a growing list of posts, they’ll be more likely to stay and scroll down to see more. The longer they stay, the greater the chances they’ll buy what you’re selling.
In the case of a song — yours or one you bought the rights to — enough plays can turn into a wave that will do what everyone hopes to see on their page: a post that goes viral.
Photo Credit: sburke2478
Question of the Week