So you have built your website, hosted your site (more on that later), and now you need to get visitors. What next?
Social media platforms account for a good portion of the traffic seen by many websites. It is not surprising therefore, that many web owners today are constantly looking for ways to improve traffic coming from social media, as well as means of improving their social media influence.
There have been a variety of posts on building a twitter following written, but one of the things some web owners are doing is buying twitter followers.
Do a quick search online for "buying twitter followers" and you will see a large number of sites offering the service. For people looking to grow their social media influence, the thoughts of getting 10,000 followers in a day is appealing, as they think a bigger following means increased business based on twitter popularity.
This is a very artificial notion. If anything, buying twitter followers will hurt your business and website reputation in the long run. This makes buying twitter followers a massive waste of time. Why is this?
1. You are not sure of the kind of followers you are getting
Generally, there are two types of followers that can be bought from these services. Targeted followers are the first group and they are people in your niche that may be interested in what you have to offer on your website. The follower sellers find them with their software, follow them and wait for the followed people to reciprocate.
The second group are artificial followers that are not human. They are bots. Many businesses that pay for followers end up purchasing bots, and, thus, they end up with a following filled with fake people.
2. Buying followers isn't always a guarantee of engagement
Buying twitter followers means you are buying figures and not people you can expect to mention and get a reply, or people that will post replies to your tweeted links, or click through them. This means that your aim of generating traffic from Twitter is ultimately defeated.
3. People can easily find out you have fake followers
Today, web and mobile apps have made it easy for anyone that cares, to know how many fake followers you have. One such application that is very popular today is the FakeFollowers application from Social Bakers. It makes it easy for anyone to see real accounts, inactive accounts and suspicious accounts following any particular handle. Your account should never have over 20% fake followers or you can be sure of losing credibility in the eyes of the investigator. If he or she is a big influence in your niche, your website may be hit with negative reviews too, which is a situation that is very hard to repair; reputation on Social Media is central.
Hosting scalability
One thing to consider as you grow your website presence is how scalable your hosting is. Marlon Davids, MD at https://www.umbeehosting.net/, explains that "one of the killers of business growth is poor website performance. There is little point in your twitter following rushing to your site if you cannot service them with a product, or even serve them your website content in a timely manner. Cloud hosting is a relatively new, scalable way to host your website, which will be able to meet your needs, even if your business goes viral."
So in summary, while it may be tempting to gather thousands of followers in a day, you will be better served going the organic way. Create your business account, tweet links from your site as well as other related sites, engage with users, organise promotions from time to time and you will be sure of growing a healthy following in time. Remember, social media traffic comes with active engagement with real people and not bots. They will only make up the numbers on your twitter profile page!