Buy followers, a controversial fashion that continues to grow

The pressure to look popular and add to social networks has created a market for buying and selling followers, through which any person or company can “cheat” and add thousands of followers in hours.

Purchased followers generally do not constitute a real audience, but are usually bots or ghost accounts created massively and automated by hackers. In other cases, they are real accounts. Where they can be obtained at a rate of 5,000 for 50 dollars, that is to say only 0.01 dollars per follower.

Why are followers bought?

There are several reasons why people resort to Followers buy. One of the most common is plain and plain vanity: there are those who want to look more popular, and having an account with few followers gives a bad image. In the corporate world, the pressure suffered by publicists and community managers to increase the numbers has caused them to resort to these shortcuts.

Even celebrities and politicians who seem not to need it incur in buying followers, in order to stay in the media, compete with others and demonstrate their influence, even if it is not real.

According to Juan Quaglia, an online marketing specialist, “Fictional popularity often attracts real popularity. People are more predisposed to interact with an account if they see that they already have many followers. It is gregarious behavior. ”

The official advertising services of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are the traditional way of advertising an account, but they are much more expensive alternatives. Those who only want to increase numbers quickly resort to buying fake followers.

How the purchase of followers is fought

Twitter is the social network that has taken more rigorous measures against buying followers. It is estimated that during the last months it has suspended 1 million accounts inactive or suspected of being false. This action did not have a positive result for the company: although many false followers have certainly been eliminated, it revealed that the platform has been losing real followers instead of winning them. As a result, Twitter shares plummeted 20%.

Facebook, meanwhile, has also announced measures, but more focused on combating the spread of false news, as a result of the controversy surrounding the use of this social network to affect the last US presidential election. Facebook is currently using smart tools that detect “coordinated inauthentic activity,” that is, fake accounts working together to spread a message.

Although Facebook has more than twice the number of Instagram users, it is on Instagram where more followers are bought. Google Trends search statistics for the purchase of followers on Instagram show that demand has been increasing steadily over the past few years.