It may seem like a neat hack or a shortcut to instant traffic, but buying Facebook fans is mostly a waste of money. Small businesses are often under pressure to show a large number of followers on social media sites. This was a common enough strategy that many brands have used over the years. However, this strategy is not working against the best intentions of small businesses that pay for it. Read below to find out why as explained by Global Resources LLC consultants:

There’s No Return on Investment – Fake fans are not interested in purchasing what you are selling. Therefore, even if you have millions of Facebook and Twitter followers, these numbers will never convert to traffic. Marketer Neil Patel recently explained that he once spent $400,000 on buying Facebook fans. What did he get in return for this investment? Nothing. There was no increase in traffic to justify the investment.

Bot Profiles Could Hurt Your Brand’s Trustworthiness – Most social media followers companies buy are actually so-called bot accounts. If a fan, or worse a competitor, notices many bot accounts liking your brand’s profiles, then that fact could be used to hurt your brand’s overall integrity. Why would a genuine customer trust a brand or a product that is being followed by fake profiles? You can preserve your brand trustworthiness by having genuine followers, even if the numbers are only a few.

The Fake Profiles Will Obscure Real Customer Profiles – Companies use social media data to build customer profiles to fine-tune future marketing efforts. If the brand’s social media customer pools are overridden with fake profiles, then this will undoubtedly skew the data. The company will not be able to determine a statistically sound average customer profile, which would then only hurt marketing efforts.

Risk of Spam is High – A small business cannot actually know what else the bot profiles are doing on the internet. Therefore, having fake profiles increases a company’s risk of social media spam. That’s one major reason not to pay a spurious agency for fake followers.

Overall, GR-US.com consultants encourage small business marketing teams to spend money on attracting real social media followers. The brand can then gather real data on what the target audience is actually like.