Here’s What Happens On TikTok When You Buy Followers
Image via Primakov / Shutterstock.com
TikTok has a billion monthly active users globally, so it makes sense to refocus marketing efforts there. Even Instagram is shaking in its boots—it’s launched a similar feature called Reels and is paying TikTokers to come on board.
TikTok’s popularity also means that you’d have to work harder to stand out from the others, which begs the question: is there a shortcut? Like with Instagram, it might be tempting to buy followers.
Before you try anything that might jeopardize your TikTok account, social media scheduling platform Hootsuite has gone ahead to inorganically grow a TikTok following so you don’t have to, detailing the results in a guest post on WeRSM.
We’re just going to say it right away: It’s not worth it.
The Hootsuite team found a number of services that offered thousands of TikTok followers at varying prices. It spilled US$39.99 for 2,500 followers on Tokmatik and an additional US$16.47 for 1,000 followers on TikFuel, making the choice to use two services just in case any of them was a scam.
Sure enough, followers flooded the account, although many of them didn’t have believable handles. As expected, buying followers didn’t have an effect on engagement. If anything, it only hindered it—but more on that later.
“As we suspected, our engagement was awful—the followers we bought did not even translate to an increase in views on our TikTok videos, let alone likes or shares,” says Hootsuite’s social media manager Amanda Wood.
TikTok also noticed suspicious activity pretty quickly and sent out a “polite” alert informing Hootsuite that it would remove fraudulent accounts to restore authenticity in its app.
Apart from potentially falling out of TikTok’s favor, Hootsuite warns that—by buying followers—you might further sabotage your chances of appearing on the coveted ‘For You’ page, since you’d be driving down your engagement rate from the wider follower-to-engagement disparity.
That means you’re actually paying to hurt your presence on TikTok.
So, the takeaway is that—even if TikTok sometimes looks like a hotbed for trends that go viral for unknown reasons, don’t count on getting a boost through equally questionable means.
[via WeRSM, cover image via Primakov / Shutterstock.com]
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