If you want to impress fans, clients, or your crush with your social media presence, you should focus on organic growth. Buying followers might seem like an easy solution, but taking a shortcut is only going to hurt you in the long run.

It is easy to tell when someone has purchased followers instead of growing their page organically, which means your real followers are going to notice something fishy. They might realize the amount of likes on each of your photographs is significantly lower than your amount of followers. They might realize you suddenly jumped from having a small amount of  followers to a massive amount of followers in only a few hours. They might even click on your list of followers and examine their pages to see if they are legitimate. (Fake followers will have little to no posts or accounts following them back.)

Once your real followers realize your growth is inorganic, you will lose their respect. They will know you are a fraud. A portion of them will decide to unfollow you since you are purposely aiming to deceive them. In the end you will end up losing followers who genuinely enjoyed your content in order to gain fake ones who aren’t going to impact your engagement at all.

There is no reason to buy followers because they are not real people. They are dead, inactive accounts. Purchased followers are never going to engage with you. They are never going to like your posts or leave genuine comments beneath your captions. The only thing you are accomplishing by buying followers is increasing the number atop your profile page. Nothing else changes.

You are not going to receive any satisfaction if you buy your followers. You are going to feel much better about yourself if you put in the energy to grow your social media pages organically. Once you reach your goal of ten thousand or one-hundred thousand followers, you will be proud of yourself for how much you have accomplished instead of embarrassed about having to cut corners.

In order to gain followers organically, you should make sure you know your audience. Pay attention to which posts they like and dislike, and then create content according to their taste. After that, make sure you post consistently. Do not leave month-long gaps between uploads. Your chances of being noticed increases along with the frequency of your posts.

On Instagram, you can also increase your chances of being seen by using thirty relevant hashtags. Do your research to figure out which tags draw the most attention to your core demographic. Meanwhile, on Facebook and Twitter, you should pin your most popular post to the top of your page so your best work is seen first, which will encourage people to follow your page.

However, increasing your follower count should not be your only goal. You should also want your followers to engage with your posts. You can increase engagement by ending your captions with a question so your followers feel like you genuinely care about them and are compelled to leave a comment. You can also comment on their posts so it doesn’t feel like a one-sided relationship. Once you have them interested in your account, you need to continue to put in effort to keep them interested because they could unfollow at any time.

It takes a lot of time and energy to grow a social media page but the results make all of the hard work worthwhile. You just have to focus on organic growth (not buying followers) because you are not a social media influencer unless you have actual, living, breathing people following your account.