Instagram Followers: Should You Buy Them? The Truth Revealed

Key Takeaways

Buying fake Instagram followers is a poor investment as they do not engage with content, harm credibility, and can lead to account suspension.
Focus on creating high-quality content, promoting your account, and building relationships with followers for sustainable growth.
Avoid purchasing followers to prevent detection by Instagram, damage to reputation, and dilution of engagement metrics.

In the fast-paced world of social media, it’s tempting to resort to quick fixes to boost your Instagram following. Buying followers may seem like an easy solution, but is it worth the risk? Let’s delve into the pros and cons to help you make an informed decision.

Fake Followers: A Recipe for Disaster

Fake followers, like empty calories, provide a temporary illusion of growth without any nutritional value. They do not engage with your content, like, comment, or share, resulting in low engagement rates. This can harm your account’s credibility and make it harder to attract real, engaged followers.

Beware of Instagram’s Watchful Eye

Instagram is not blind to the fake follower epidemic. They actively remove bots and fake accounts from their platform. If your account is found to have a significant number of fake followers, you risk suspension or even permanent deletion. Don’t let your Instagram dreams turn into a nightmare.

Damage to Reputation: A Social Media Disaster

Buying followers can severely damage your reputation and credibility. It’s easy for people to spot fake followers, and it can make your business look unprofessional and untrustworthy. Remember, your online presence reflects your brand’s image, and you don’t want to tarnish it with artificial followers.

Wasted Investment: Throwing Money Down the Drain

The money you spend on buying fake followers is essentially wasted. These followers will not contribute to your business or help you achieve your marketing goals. It’s like pouring water into a leaky bucket—a futile effort that yields no results.

Algorithm Manipulation: Hurting Your Visibility

Buying followers can manipulate Instagram’s algorithm, making it more difficult for your content to reach real, engaged users. Instagram prioritizes content that is popular and engaging, so having a large number of fake followers can actually hurt your visibility. It’s like trying to win a race with a broken car—you’re bound to fall behind.

How to Buy Instagram Followers (If You Really Must)

If you’re still considering buying Instagram followers, be aware that there are many companies that sell fake followers. These companies often use click farms, which are groups of people paid to create fake accounts and follow other accounts.

The process of buying followers typically involves:

Choosing a Provider: There are many companies that sell fake followers. You’ll need to do some research to find a reputable provider that offers real-looking followers.
Selecting a Package: Most providers offer different packages with varying numbers of followers. The more followers you purchase, the more expensive the package will be.
Providing Your Account Information: Once you’ve selected a package, you’ll need to provide the provider with your Instagram account information. This includes your username, password, and sometimes your email address.
Paying for the Followers: You’ll need to pay for the followers using a credit card, PayPal, or cryptocurrency.
Waiting for the Followers to Arrive: Once you’ve paid, the provider will typically add the followers to your account within a few days.

Where to Buy Instagram Followers (But Proceed with Caution)

There are many companies that sell Instagram followers. Some of the more popular providers include:

Buzzoid: Buzzoid promises “the fastest delivery” and guarantees new followers within hours of payment. They also offer a subscription service for “automatic likes” where you can receive automatic likes and video views from “real users” on every new post for a monthly fee.
Twicsy: Like many of its competitors, Twicsy promises “Real Users, Real Accounts, Fast Delivery!”. Twicsy does not offer managed growth, only the choice between “real” and “premium” followers.
Famoid: Famoid was used for a fake follower experiment (details in the video below). In summary, Famoid promises “all real and active” followers, though in their experience, they were quite obviously fake.
Kicksta: This tool is a bit different. It promises 100% natural, organic growth through the magic of artificial intelligence. You provide Kicksta with a list of accounts that have the followers you want (e.g., competitors or influencers), and Kicksta likes the posts of those followers. The idea is that these users are more likely to follow you after receiving a notification of your like.
GetInsta: One thing I like about GetInsta is that (like The Gap) they always have a sale going on.
Mr. Insta: Of all the fake follower websites we investigated, this one had the widest variety of offerings. Mr. Insta is like the Cheesecake Factory of shady services and is considerably more expensive than the competition. In exchange for the high price, Mr. Insta promises to deliver “the most and most realistic followers.” This was also the only service where customers could pay with US Dollar General or CVS gift cards.
Social Boost: This service only offers growth management but comes with a higher price tag than the competition and the appropriate Etsy-worthy adjectives (“handcrafted growth!”). Unlike most other websites, Social Boost doesn’t promise a specific number of followers. Instead, they promise to target and engage with Instagram users to grow your account over time.

How Much Does It Cost to Buy Instagram Followers?

The cost of buying Instagram followers varies depending on the service. Most providers offer a bulk discount, making it seem like a better deal to buy 10,000 followers than a few hundred.

In general, buying Instagram followers is cheap. Most of the providers we looked at charged around $15 for 1,000 followers. Some were more expensive, in the range of $25-40.

Growth management services, which use automation or manual engagement to generate followers, are more expensive. These services can cost between $50 and $250 per month.

Is It Worth It to Buy Instagram Followers?

In short, no, it is not worth it to buy Instagram followers.

While these services can temporarily boost your account with low-quality Instagram followers, the equation doesn’t add up. Even real followers are a vanity metric that doesn’t represent meaningful ROI. However, when those real followers actually engage with your content, they are more likely to become customers. As our experiments show, even the “highest quality” fake followers are usually random accounts that have nothing to do with your business or niche. They will never engage with your posts, become real customers, or spread positive word-of-mouth about your company.

If your sole goal is to get more followers, then these services will help you achieve that goal. At least temporarily, until Instagram notices the spammy activity on your account and suspends it.

However, if you want to build a successful business, connect with customers, and generate revenue from your social media strategy, there are better ways to spend your time and money.

What Happens When You Buy Expensive Instagram Followers?

We ran a few tests to see what happens when you buy Instagram followers. In 2021, we purchased cheap Instagram followers from Famoid. This year, in the name of science, we shelled out more money for a premium growth management service. There were a few differences:

The Premium Service Meant More Work for Us: Since the goal of these services is to get “organic” engagement by liking and following other accounts on your behalf, you have to do your homework. Our growth agent required us to provide information about influencers, demographics, and hashtags so they could figure out who to target.
We Received Security Warnings from Instagram: These premium fake follower services require your account credentials so they can log in on your behalf. Since click farms are spread out all over the world, the agents use a VPN to make it look like they are logging in from your actual location.
We Also Received Security Warnings from Our Bank: When we tried to pay for our growth management service, our credit card was declined, and our bank repeatedly called us because they were afraid of fraud. We convinced them to release our card, and the first payment went through.
The Results Were Lackluster: Nineteen days after trying to make our first payment, we finally saw the promised followers. Drumroll, please!

After 19 days, we had 37 new followers. That’s about two followers per day, the kind of growth you could achieve with a little effort and without any worrisome international transactions.

By the time we ended the experiment, we had a few more followers. At the four-week mark, we were up to 335 followers. That’s about $1.50 per follower. At that price, you’d expect them to be pretty good. But they were inactive, looked extremely fake, and had zero relevance to our account.

We Received Some Strange DMs: As any self-help book will tell you, the energy you put out into the world comes back to you. And when you engage in shady practices, you attract shady people. Our DMs during this experiment were quite the mixed bag, including two offers from fortune tellers and an invitation to join the Illuminati.

4 Reasons NOT to Buy Instagram Followers

Instagram Can Tell: Like the great bot crackdown of 2018, Instagram is constantly working to keep the platform safe and authentic. This means fake accounts are regularly purged, and action is taken against users who purchase them. If Instagram detects suspicious account activity, your account could be suspended or permanently deleted.
Brands Will Avoid Working with You: Fake followers are no secret, and reputable brands want to make sure they’re not working with businesses or influencers who use them. Free tools like HypeAuditor make it easy to find out who’s artificially inflating their follower count.
Real Users Won’t Follow You: Even regular Instagram users can tell when your account is mostly followed by fake accounts. Ever look at an Instagram post where the only comments are from obvious spam accounts? It’s a huge turnoff.
You Mess Up Your Analytics: When you have a lot of purchased followers, your follower count may be high, but your engagement will be very low because these fake followers don’t interact with your content.

This scares off brands and partners who care more about high engagement rates than high follower counts. A typical engagement rate is between 1% and 5% per post. The more fake followers you have, the more this engagement rate is diluted.

It also makes it harder for you to figure out what’s working and improve your social media strategy. When all your followers are real, you can easily see what content they respond to by looking at which posts and stories get more engagement than others.

What to Do Instead of Buying Instagram Followers

If you want to grow your Instagram following, there are plenty of legitimate ways to do it. It won’t happen overnight, but the followers you earn will be worth a lot more than the ones you buy.

Create Really Good Content: There’s no shortcut here, unfortunately. Audiences are sophisticated, and so are brands. That means you need to post engaging videos and high-quality photos accompanied by well-written captions.
Promote Your Instagram Account Everywhere: Make it easy for people to find you on Instagram. If possible, keep your username consistent across all social media platforms. That way, someone who follows you on TikTok will know how to find you on Instagram.
Run a Contest: If you’re looking for a quick fix, Instagram contests are a great way to boost your follower count fast. By getting users to follow your account, tag friends, and share your content on their own accounts to enter, you’ll gain new followers and increase your reach.
Focus on Relationships: Your followers don’t just want to be talked at—they want to be talked to. That means responding to comments, doing Q&A sessions in Stories, and sharing user-generated content on your feed are just a few ways to show your followers that you’re listening to them too.
Spend Money on Ads Instead of Followers: If you want more reach, Instagram advertising is a legitimate (and effective) way to get it. Instagram paid ads reach up to 1.48 billion people, which means you’re bound to pick up some new followers.
Stay on Trend: If you want to stay ahead of the curve on Instagram, you need to keep up with the times. User tastes and preferences are constantly evolving, so your content needs to keep up. Here’s what Insta users want to see in 2022.

Looking for more ways to grow your following without bots? We’ve got 35 tips for getting more Instagram followers.

Bonus: Why do people buy fake followers? The answer is simple: vanity. They want their Instagram account to look more popular and successful than it actually is. They think that having more followers will make them look more credible, attractive, and influential. But the truth is, buying fake followers is a waste of time and money. It won’t make you look any more popular or successful, and it could actually damage your reputation.

If you’re serious about growing your Instagram following, focus on creating great content and building real relationships with your followers. It may take more time and effort, but it’s the only way to build a sustainable and successful Instagram account.

Conclusion: Don’t buy Instagram followers. It’s a waste of time and money. Instead, focus on creating great content and building real relationships with your followers.

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