Erin
Our society is now at a place where it can be beneficial to have a social media presence in many ways. Whether you are an influencer, a business, or an artist, having an audience online can launch your career.
Because of how influential social media can be for someone’s career, people are even turning to pay for “likes” online. Instagram, in particular, has a large user base that chooses to purchase likes on the platform for their content.
There are many reasons why someone may buy likes. But in the end, it can be fruitless and even damaging to do so. If you want to know why you should never buy Instagram likes, keep reading.
Is it Okay to Buy Likes on Instagram?
The short answer is no. But the question you need to ask yourself is: “should I buy likes on Instagram?”
If you are dead set on buying Instagram likes, however, you must know that there may be a punishment for doing so. It is against Instagram’s rules to buy yourself a certain amount of likes for your picture. Instagram may label buying likes as “spam behavior” and ban your account.
How Do You Buy Likes?
Because Instagram will punish your account for buying likes, they also won’t sell likes to accounts either. To buy likes, you will have to visit a website that sells them.
Many websites sell Instagram likes – some growth services even sell likes. Some are cheaper than others, but almost all of them do the same thing. These websites allow you to purchase packages for certain amounts of money.
For example, Buzzoid allows you to buy from 50 to 10,000 likes at varying prices. These likes will instantly go to your account. Depending on where you buy the likes from, your account will get the number of likes you purchase over some time.
Other times, the likes you get are for one time only.
Why You Shouldn’t Buy Instagram Likes
When starting up a small business or brand, it may seem tempting to put a small amount of money into your social media. After all, there are many reasons why it is beneficial to have many likes on your page.
But buying Instagram likes is not the way to go for several reasons.
Transparency
When you buy likes on Instagram, people won’t be able to tell which likes are real and which likes are fake.
However, it is still often transparent when someone is buying Instagram likes for their page.
Most Instagram pages have a pretty consistent follower-to-like ratio. That ratio may be different for each page, but it’s pretty easy to see how many likes someone gets consistently.
Let’s say that someone is getting around 100 likes on a photo on average. It can be obvious when that same person suddenly gets 600 likes on a photo. It’s not often that a huge jump in likes happens overnight.
Most of the time, engagement from a social media audience grows steadily over time. There are certain things that accounts can do to help their growth. But when you resort to buying likes, it can be obvious to everyone who follows you.
When an audience catches on to a profile buying likes, they typically do not respect the page as much. Buying likes makes an account appear disingenuous.
Won’t Help Your Business
Buying likes does not buy actual engagement. If your page is a brand or business, you need to have a genuine engagement to be successful.
At the same time, an influencer needs to have a genuine audience to make a presentation. Likes help with engagement, but they are not the most important factor.
The algorithm for Instagram changes periodically. But as it stands right now, Instagram favors profiles that have a lot of audience engagement. A profile that gets 200 likes a photo can have way more engagement than a page that gets 1,000 likes a photo.
When you are a business, what matters is that you have real people with money interacting with your page. Each person that visits your page is a potential customer. When you buy your likes, you aren’t buying any new potential customers.
Instagram Actively Bans It
If you get caught buying likes by the Instagram platform, there may be severe consequences to your account.
Spam behavior is not something that Instagram is particularly on board with. Instagram works hard to curb this kind of behavior to make the platform feel more authentic.
Spam behavior may include buying likes, following too many accounts, and more. When an account follows and likes too often, the punishment is usually just a soft ban. The ban will lift within one to two days after the initial incident.
However, buying likes or continuously liking and following accounts after a ban can result in more severe punishment. In these cases, Instagram is more likely to ban your account for an indefinite time.
Not every account that buys likes will be shut down immediately. Sometimes, accounts will buy likes only once or twice. In these cases, the platform is less likely to notice this activity than an account that relies on buying likes.
But as Instagram continues to weed out spam behavior, buying likes even once can be a risk. And you don’t want to risk a business venture over something as silly as buying likes.
It can be hard to grow an audience, but there are many ways that you can help the growth of your account without resorting to buying lies.
Conclusion
Overall, there are many reasons why you should never buy Instagram likes.
Right now, Instagram wants its users to develop strong relationships with each other. A genuine and organic audience is the way to go.
As an influencer or brand, an audience is more likely to engage with you based on how you are engaging with others. If the only thing on your profile is a bunch of likes that you bought, no one is going to share or talk about your brand.
