When you start your Facebook page, Twitter handle, Instagram page or youtube channel, all you want is to get lots of followers and subscribers like other pages you have seen online with everyone sharing liking and commenting on the tweets and posts of whatever is offered to them.
The reasons for this are obvious.
Marketing refers to the activities undertaken to promote awareness, buying and selling of a product to potential customers. In the 21st century, social media marketing is a must for any business, company or project to thrive.
But when reality sets in and you realize you’re not getting any followers and no one is even liking your product or whatever you post which creates a setback and makes you think what’s wrong?
It’s then that you would actually go into research and trade quick-fix ways of finding followers and people to share your content. You can invest some money in facebook or twitter to market your product for you through sponsored ads but what if you don’t have that money
One of the options to fix this is through joining follow for follow groups, like for like or share for share
The followers come with a warning follow for follow if you do not follow me back I will unfollow you and that’s why you could be losing tons of followers every day.
Why follow for follow is not good for a business
This works in the short run because as long as you keep following you will get followers but in the long run its one of the worst business strategies you can have, take for instance if someone is following you for the sake of following you and they don’t like what you are offering, they are never going to like it, they won’t share it or subscribe it.
This makes it completely useless because if they loved your content or product they would share it, subscribe to it, invite their friends of friends because they are interested in what your offer.
But when you do a follow for follow you are likely to attract a large audience that is not interested in your product and how are you going to sell a product to people who are not interested in it, not that they are necessarily not aware of its existence
Why follow for follow does not work for business
People will follow or like your pages because you invited them to like your page not because they like what your page offers. Even when they comment they do it because they expect you to return the favor and when you look through the comments they are not really authentic with what you posted because they didn’t read through it. Just thank you and claiming you did a really great job
At the end of the day that’s when you find Facebook pages and Instagram pages with over 10k followers with no likes on their products this is because these people liked the page just because they were invited to like this page not because they really like what is being given to them by the page
It’s like inviting someone to like a page about helping to lose weight when actually they never ever cared about losing weight and at the end of the day they will not like or share or comment on what you post or buy your product because it’s not of any use to them.
At the end of it, you actually end up posting products that are very irrelevant to the people you offering them to just because you told them to follow you simple as that which makes your whole project of the social media marketing strategy fail because your audience is not interested in the products you are advertising to them
You would want to share content that people will like and be interested in it. This will showcase its self in a high engagement rate, comments and replies because have their opinions, views, and perspectives about a certain topic or product you are offering them
This is my experience with follow for follow
After opening up my Facebook page for lesoned I decided to invite a couple of people from my friends’ list. I didn’t even know most of them personally which was okay.
All I wanted was to get a high number of followers and likes. This is when reality set in, every time I posted something it would get good impressions meaning that actually, someone saw whatever I posted but not really interested in what I was offering them through engagement
That’s why I never got a single recommendation. Comment like or share on facebook and twitter. On Instagram, I happened to get two followers I didn’t do a follow for follow for . They liked every picture I put up probably whenever they got see it but were never directly part of my follow for follow trick.
This is when I realized my social media business promotion is a complete failure. This is like trying to sell fashion to people interested in sports. No one will buy into your styles not because they are bad but you are targeting a wrong audience
I saw a Facebook page that actually has 10,000 followers which meant it would at least have a minimum of at least 1000 people getting a chance to see whatever is being posted on Facebook but for the last over 30 posts that had been made to the page. There was no single like, share or comment. The page seemed deserted.
It’s no use getting these people to like and follow your page without being interested in whatever product you are offering them through engaging with it
Solution
The easier way would be signing up sponsored ads on social networks because they have worked for some people and given them lots of interested followers. of course, you have to cash out for them
The other strategy to fix this is a little bit simple but it would actually take time to build engagement of your own for your own social profile. It’s hard to build a community of your own especially when the content you provide actually exists and the difference is your version of the content
The ways that you are actually going to do this is by inviting only close friends and tell them “hey this is my site support me. It’s not a coincidence that actually Facebook tells you to invite friends to your page.
The page may not really be interesting to them but since they are your friends, they will not mind supporting you, besides what do they lose if they share, tweet or like what have you have posted.
It’s through them sharing, retweeting and liking your products that people who are actually interested in your product see it and come to check it out.
Label what you providing, jokes, health, parenting, fashion or sports
You should also clearly label what your content is about so that someone who is looking for it can actually find it. If someone is looking for a health blog label it that and when they come across it they are likely to follow it because they are interested and they want what it offers
The upside of a follow for follow
The follow for follow has a psychological problem with a person that is randomly looking for a page to follow or a product to buy. A person is likely to follow a page with a high number of followers and high engagement than one with few followers
This is where follow for follow is a bonus; the more followers you have, the higher your network will grow and the higher the chances of meeting potential clients interested in your product
No one would want to follow a page with few followers probably because to them that means that it has no valuable or useful content to offer. Besides if it did, it would have lots of followers
But never mind the numbers, when you get off the follow train, the number of followers stops growing and starts going down as some people will deliberately unfollow you hoping u don’t do the same
The reason is that these people are only following you because you are following them not because they like your content or product at all. And they use blackmail tricks one them being if you unfollow me I unfollow you. This can be done using a number of Twitter and Instagram unfollow apps
The people that are actually interested in your content will look for it or it comes their way through being shared or liked or tweeted, they will also buy into what you offer because its what they want and you have it.
When interested people find your content or product you offer and they like it. they will be willing to like it or share it with others because they feel its worth it not because they expect you to like or share theirs too in return
So you should always have useful relevant content that is worth sharing or you will see people commenting with sarcasm” thanks for sharing this post has really changed my life” or after reading this post I called all my village mates to read and they said their lives have been changed too”
It’s better to have 10 genuine followers who are actually interested in your content, engage with it and share it to others than have 10k followers who never like, share or engage with your content in any way
Conclusion
Even though Instagram follow for follow or twitter follow for follow will get you followers but it is like paying money to someone to love you. They are only with you because you paying them and they need the money but once you stop giving them money, the relationship also ends because they don’t like you, just pretending and that’s how these follow for follow networks and follow trains work.
And the whole blackmail of if you unfollow me I unfollow you won’t get you anywhere in the long run unless you are planning to collect Instagram followers or twitter followers and later sell off the account.
You have probably seen those Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts with very beautiful girls(probable photos of other beautiful users used without their consent or scraped from Google) giving you free love and asking you to like their page and don’t unfollow while also asking you to share their page in various groups and inviting your friends
Right now it’s your close friends that are actually willing to support your small business besides if even your friends can’t pretend to like it then it’s another sign for you to go back to the drawing board and make it better
It’s from there that interested users and potential customers will come in and engage with your product because they like it but follow for follow as a social media marketing strategy for long term to create awareness of your product is a no go zone
Well I hope you learned something and you won’t really make that social media marketing mistake that most of the people are making when trying to create awareness of their social media Pages or new businesses
