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In modern marketing, social media is the bedrock of your brand image. The challenge is simple: who says great visibility, says greater notoriety.
In order to give an illusion of popularity by increasing the number of fans and other followers, companies and individuals can mass buy Twitter and Facebook subscribers or even buy thousands of views on Youtube, for a fee from a specialized service provider.
There are many companies on the square that deliver subscribers to you in packs of 1000, and their existence has always been a source of controversy.
Although I myself have never bought a single subscriber (my number of Twitter followers has not exceeded the 4000 twittos mark for years), I see that the entire Internet is rising up against fake influencers. They are “upstarts” who use precisely these practices. They are presented as simple self-centered cheaters, because they exchanged a few $ to increment a counter.
As a professional marketer, I remain perplexed by this “crusade against the fake”. Curious, I would like to take a step back and ask more general questions:
- Fake fans / likes / views: is this something that has really rotten social platforms?
- Apart from proven scams, with fake accounts created on the other side of the world, how do these service providers go about boosting the counters in record time?
- How does this practice pose quality challenges ? Should the marketer be afraid of it?
- Can a “big” counter really solve a “content” problem?
- Does buying views always mean trade flop?
- What is the underlying problem ?
I will share with you in this article, in 2,500 words, the personal answers I have to these questions.
The problem of fake : the internet is full of bots, it’s not new
The real scam: bots and fake accounts as real fans
It is certain that by choosing the wrong service provider, you can easily fall into the purchase of “zombie” accounts, which only give the illusion of community.
The worst nightmare is when the counter drops :
- either because the platform has “withdrawn” the commitments deeming them to be false,
- or just because everyone unsubscribes soon after (like, right away).
The New York Times has also tested several services that offer to buy views on Youtube. Their report shows that with certain services, the counter fell like a bellows, after having been filtered by the anti-spam service of Youtube.
Bots and fake accounts are the nightmare of social platforms, which are working hard to fight the scourge
You should know that on social networks, there is always a share of “bot” traffic. It’s one of the problems of the web, and it’s not new. This is also why IAB has set up a viewability standard, which makes it possible to counter part of the fraudulent traffic (because a bot cannot really leave an advertisement displayed for 1 second on the screen).
The good news for users is that the platforms have gone to war against “fake views” and fake accounts. They track them down, filter them, delete them and further strengthen their defenses against what they deem to be spam, and which damages the credibility of their services.
- At Google / Youtube, generating “fake views” is against the TOS. The giant dedicates a large team of engineers, statisticians and data scientists to combat false views, and limit them to less than 1% of the views recorded by the platform
- Facebook, which has embarked on a real witch hunt for months, admitted to having deleted more than 25 million hateful content, spam or showing nudity on its platform, and 583 million fake accounts in the world.
- Last year, Instagram unveiled a robust anti-spam filter capable of detecting and moderating fake comments in 9 languages.
- Twitter was recently noticed for having also “cleaned up” causing the loss of several thousand followers for some users of the micro-blogging service.
There are tools & methods to detect fakes, accessible on the internet
“You are never better served than by yourself” goes the saying.
You will find many tutorials on the web TO learn how to detect fake views, fake fans or fake likes… All you need is a simple Google search to find them.
And fortunately for marketers, there are many tools that allow them to detect “fakes” on social networks:
- Faker allows you to quantify the number of fake followers of a Twitter account
- You can find a similar tool on influencermarketinghub.com or igaudit.io for Instagram
- Tools like Scraawl can also help brands check if their Youtube videos or Facebook posts are reaching a real audience.
The general public, like marketers, therefore have more and more resources at their disposal to verify the authenticity of their community.
Apart from the fake, what is this black magic behind these thousands of subscribers & views? Just ads
Companies that sell you subscribers often use advertising levers to achieve the desired result
Let’s be clear; there are scammers who willfully sell you bots & fake accounts as authentic views, fans, followers and whatever you want and some still succeed. But the point of this article is not to discuss the level of scams in this industry.
How do these actors who promise you results in record time go about it?
The answer is simple: advertising.
These businesses use a means known to all to gain subscribers for their customers; they activate the media levers made available by the platforms in question.
A core business of “media negotiator”, which appeals to companies looking for rationalization and rapid results
Except for those whose business model is based on bot farms, the core business of these companies is to buy, at the lowest possible price, the expected result and resell it with a margin :
- you pay 1000€ for 10,000 views (0.02€/view)
- and they manage to reach this amount for 0.01€.
- This is how their margins are built.
Myself, I deal with major advertisers on a daily basis, and I can assure you that all of them ask that their advertising budgets bring in the maximum results (even if it is sometimes a question of vanity metrics ). And after all, those who “buy” the most media are not always the worst performers. And of course, most brands are willing to pay to amplify their name in a short period of time, with the hope of reaching the mass of people willing to buy their products.
Does advertising to gain views or subscribers pose quality constraints?
Buying subscribers via companies that only do that is like going on TV “in random mode”: we don’t target, we water…
Companies that sell you subscribers therefore use advertising to bring you back views and followers… of course. But you shouldn’t expect them to have been meticulously selected either, with a surgical targeting (“you can’t have the butter and the money for the butter” ).
The most surprising thing when we look at these services that sell subscribers or views, is that many orders actually come from public relations companies or marketing agencies, which have themselves sold huge spin-offs to their advertiser.
But at such prices, you can be sure that the advertisements target… everyone, without making any distinction. Because advertising is like everything: if you are looking for a “rare” audience (in a certain geographical area, with a certain profile & specific interests), you will pay more.
Companies that sell views & subscribers want to reassure
To limit the perverse effects of “bazooka” advertising, the companies that sell these services create offers made to give advertisers confidence.
- Some confirm the possibility of targeting by geography,
- or offer guarantees on the sudden loss of results.
This is how some service providers want to be more reassuring. Fastlikes.fr for example presents its methods as safe and reliable to allow you to acquire a real celebrity on social networks. The services offered allow you to buy Instagram followers, on Twitter, but also the purchase of fans on Facebook, views on YouTube.
To reassure on the quality of the work, the company even offers a one-month guarantee against any followers or views that would desert too quickly…
- The latter consists of “re-acquiring” possible missing followers who would have unsubscribed afterwards (because, as a reminder, advertising is not “targeted”), until the account stabilizes.
- These elements of reassurance are intended to prove that the service provider is sure of the methods it uses to obtain its results, and that the followers acquired are real.
- It even goes as far as a replacement or refund guarantee in the event of a major loss of more than 50% followers.
But wouldn’t all these counter stories distract us from the “real”? Namely, the primordial question of the result…
Can inflating your counters increase your sales?
Do not confuse “fraud” and “advertising”
In this brouhaha where false views, false accounts created on the chain, loss of credibility of certain influencers are intertwined, people take shortcuts and do not hesitate to “throw out the baby with the bathwater”.
Because I repeat, we must not put in the same bag “fraud” and “advertising”. For a platform like Facebook in particular, if you don’t advertise, you have little chance of being seen by anyone… And you’ll see that even with “ultra-optimized” advertising, a business can manage to boost its revenues by promoting it on social media.
- In the case that I am going to show you,
- it is a B2C business,
- who started “buying views”
- through Youtube ads.
- Its results will amaze you…
An “ultra-optimized” advertisement, very well bought, where each view costs between 0.01€ and 0.00€
Advertisements on Youtube are governed by an auction system. You know, these are those ads that play before the video you want to see and can “skip”.
The best online media buying professionals are able to get results for very low costs. As shown in the screenshot below, the company I am talking about managed to buy almost 300,000 Youtube views at a price of 0.004€ per view.
- It’s an amazing optimization performance,
- knowing that these are targeted advertisements according to the country and the interests of the users (ex: targeting political news junkies),
- therefore an audience that is often more expensive for advertisers.
Seeing these figures, skeptical marketers will inevitably ask themselves the following question: has this had any impact on the advertiser’s business? The answer is yes…!
Sales and ROI have been multiplied by 2
Not only has the turnover from advertisements almost doubled, but by buying better, the company has managed to increase its ROI by up to 539%!
In other words, the business earns €539 in sales each time it invests €100 in advertising. This is a very honorable return for this type of advertising!
Moreover, the company in question does not rely only on the purchase of views to develop its turnover. It also uses other paid levers, just as well bought, which manage to contribute profitably to their growth.
The lessons of this real case are therefore the following:
- Investing (correctly) in advertising can impact your sales
- It’s still not because you buy “cheap” that it does not work
- However, you need very specific expertise to get the butter (sales that take off) and the money for the butter (cheap advertising)
Basically, advertising “know how” is only part of success. Because to obtain such results, you must not forget a crucial element: the quality of what you offer.
Buying fans will never solve the problem of engagement & content quality
Stay focused on the quality of the content, always…
Whatever the number of fans / subscribers, you should never be distracted by a vanity metric. It is not on it that you will build a business and a flourishing image in the long term (especially if you buy them badly and the platforms delete them after the fact).
To hold on for the long term and really create a lasting and healthy presence, you cannot ignore the quality of your content. As I said in a previous article, “buying your traffic is not a guarantee of getting the business off the ground”!
How can a business such as the one I just told you about achieve this?
- With a strong expertise in media buying as we have seen,
- but also with quality content and offers.
Because indeed, even if each view only cost €0.004, the video was professional, authentic, interesting and really made you want to go to the site to buy.
The problem is not only the size of a community, or even the purchase of views and subscribers: it is above all the strategy of certain brands on social networks
The failure of some businesses is not rooted in the fact that they “bought” 10,000 views or 5,000 likes… Because what companies buy through packs of 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or 1 million followers in no way replaces the intrinsic quality of what they offer. The real reason is that their content is low quality, does not captivate the crowds and their offers are not able to convert.
Too often, marketers (mistakenly) think that their products, content, and all of their posts are awesome, and the only missing ingredient is “exposure” to thousands of people. And very often, after doing all-out advertising, after increasing their number of subscribers, they still don’t have more results… What’s the problem? And quite simply that the content, at the start, was not that good…
- Having millions of followers on Twitter does not necessarily mean that these people are really interested in your content, your brand.
- Just because you have 100,000 views on Youtube doesn’t mean you’re going to go “viral” if no one actually shares your content, amplifies it, comments on it…
- Just because you have 100,000 Instagram followers doesn’t mean you have an attractive, converting offer.
- And if you market the worst product in the world, it is not millions invested in advertising or a community of 10,000,000 subscribers that will make you rich. The company is, from the start, doomed to failure.
But how many brands have favored the counters on social media at the sacrifice of commitment and the quality of their offer?
- Pointing fingers at certain dishonest providers who sell fake subscribers by the thousands and making a scandal out of it is one thing…
- But if it really got brands to audit and rethink their social media strategies, then that would be even better.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it is not a number on a counter…
It is above all a story of confidence in a name. Because the real issue is not to buy subscribers or not, but to know how to maintain credibility. This is the real business question behind buying fans, views or any social media metric.
By purchasing these services from the wrong provider, brands and influencers can damage the trust of their community, and sometimes their entire reputation.
Does that mean you should never use paid? Not at all.
It is still proven, in 2018, that reaching a wider audience actually helps to develop your sales, as shown by the case I described to you above. Advertising remains an almost indispensable solution to industrialize a brand and make it a large-scale business.
