21 Sep Dear New Businesses on Social Media – You Have to Stop Buying Likes
Believe it or not, buying likes and followers is still a problem. We’re not sure who is handing out the advice that false engagement on a social media post will help get you noticed online, but we’re here to tell you to STOP. This is an old strategy that has proven to harm businesses and their online reputation.
WHY IT HURTS YOU
Credibility
Consumers are smarter than you think. If you have 50 followers on Instagram but somehow have 200 likes on all your posts, people will get suspicious. Aside from signaling to your competitors that your business may not be as well off as you want to present, it denotes a lack of credibility on your part as a business owner.
Instagram Updates
As recently as 2018, Instagram has begun releasing updates that remove these inauthentic accounts. This means that once those accounts get deleted, so will the engagement on your posts. Remember that accounts with 1000 followers tend to have around an 8% engagement rate on average, so having lower likes with fewer followers is entirely normal and does not reflect your business’s quality.
Likes =/= Customers
One of the biggest deterrents from buying likes should be that those fake accounts will not use your services, which means there is virtually no return on investment whatsoever. It would be best if you concerned yourself with real people’s real likes that can be converted to leads, not the fake ones who will not create traffic to your website.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Focus On Shares and Saves
While comments and likes on Instagram are great, the app measures truly great content by how many shares and saves a specific post has. This tells the algorithm that people like your content so much that they want other people to see it. By focusing on creating high-quality content for your pages, you encourage others to actively engage with what you’re sharing.
Engage Back
Reply to their comments, messages, and reviews – these are all tracked. Ever notice how Facebook shows on your business page that you have a _% response rate on messages? While this feature is only primarily available to the page owner, Facebook will indicate if a page has a high responsiveness rate with their private messages. You should always shoot for this on your page.
Another reason to engage back with the people on your page is that consumers like to see it! This shows a more human aspect of your brand, which is extremely important. When consumers see you as more than a company, it builds a certain level of trust that makes them more likely to purchase your product.
If you are having trouble getting your brand off the ground with social media, contact the experts at Life In Motion. We have years of experience improving engagement across all platforms and making your brand stand out. Please visit our website lifeinmotion.com or calling 817.431.9681 to get started.