People seeking general advice on how to get more Twitter fans should follow ← this link. This post, on the other hand, is dedicated to a very sensitive topic of purchasing Twitter followers, or rather an argument of why that is essentially always a bad idea.
There is a proliferation of services offering you to buy real Twitter followers cheap, and there is a lot of competition in the paid advertising space around those queries.
As far as I am concerned, there is only one reason you should buy followers: to increase their count. Not to generate any valuable activity, but to simply have more.
Should You Buy Twitter Followers?
Can you buy Twitter followers? Of course! The question is: should you?
Buying Real Twitter Followers
Some businesses will say that you can buy real Twitter followers, which appears highly counter-intuitive even at a first glance. Imagine that someone paid you to follow her Twitter account. You may, but what will you do once you become a follower? Even if you check out the posts on that account and share them on your own timeline, how likely is it to have a positive impact on that person’s KPI?
KPIs – Key Performance Indicators
KPIs carry us back to the question of why you want to gain Twitter followers. Unless you are after bragging rights only (whose number is bigger), you want people to take actions that are valuable for you. Buying Twitter followers is essentially an investment: you pay money, and you want something back. Depending on what exactly you want from your followers, your KPIs will fall into one of the two main buckets: Engagement and DR (Direct response). Put simply, Engagement is what doesn’t have to do with sales immediately (retweets, likes, comments, time on site, average session duration…), and DR is what does.
Number of Twitter Followers Itself is Not a KPI
This is crucial to understand. A high number of followers per se will not bring you closer to your goal: it’s what they do that may, provided you got the right crowd. The right followers are those who do what you want.
Competition on Twitter
It may seem there could be no real competition for gaining Twitter followers because the same user can follow many different accounts (as opposed to buying only one or a few cars). But consider somebody who follows several hundred accounts. Do you think s(he) pays equal attention to all of them? No, s(he) has a handful of favorites that take up most of her attention while the rest gets very little. And somebody following thousands of accounts probably hasn’t even checked most of them in a very long time. This is why you don’t want people who just didn’t mind hitting the “follow” button (in fact, they are usually harmful to getting a clear idea of what your true fan base is). You want people who can take actions that are beneficial to your business. And a dead Twitter bot purchased in a batch with another hundred thousand ones is not going to do it.
