Building a large Twitter following can take a great deal of time and effort, leading many businesses and marketers to look for shortcuts and schemes to boost their follower count. However, buying Twitter followers can be extremely risky, as there are many different ways for these schemes to backfire. Here are six reasons you should never buy Twitter followers.

Bought Followers are Not Real People

Despite many sellers claiming to provide real people as part of their follower sales packages, most paid followers are bots or spammers that will never read any of your marketing messages. Having a high follower count is not the same as having a large audience. Most paid followers are essentially useless, as they will not engage with your content or retweet your messages.

Other Users Can Identify Fake Followers

Not only can experienced Twitter users identify bots and paid followers, but there are now applications that can analyze your follower list and find out how many fake followers you have. If you are operating a business in a highly-competitive market, your competitors will always be looking for a way to gain an advantage. Exposing a large number of fake Twitter followers on your account may be just the advantage they are looking for.

Exposure Can Ruin Your Reputation

Customers, potential customers and other Twitter users take a dim view of businesses using paid followers and other schemes to increase their audience. If you are caught buying followers, your business reputation can be ruined and it will be extremely difficult to regain the trust of those who previously supported you. Competitors, suppliers and industry influencers are also likely to lose respect for your company.

Fake Followers Render Twitter Analytics Useless

Twitter Analytics enables you to analyze your marketing efforts and gather information about the demographics of your audience. This information can be extremely valuable when planning future marketing campaigns and will give you some interesting insights. However, having a large number of fake followers will render the analytics information useless, as bots and spammers will not offer demographic information or interact with your content.

Sellers Could Access Your Account

Many sellers offering fake followers require access to your Twitter account. Once you have granted access to the seller, they can use your account to send spam, malicious communications and direct messages to your followers. The potential for permanent damage to your business reputation is huge, as it would be almost impossible to rebuild trust once your real followers have received malicious messages from your account.

Twitter Could Suspend Your Account

If Twitter deems that your account activities violate their terms of use, they could suspend your account. Businesses often find it difficult to recover from account suspensions, even if their account is later reinstated, as they lose the trust of their customers. If your account is closed, you will have to start again with no followers and no social media content.

Buying Twitter followers may seem like an easy way to boost your audience, but it can easily backfire and potentially damage your business reputation. Successful Twitter marketing is built on relationships and interaction, both of which involve a long-term strategy. Offering value, entertainment and information to other Twitter users is the best way to increase your follower count.