When you buy Instagram likes instead of earning them on your own, there are only two outcomes that can happen: Your engagement doesn’t grow, but you’re eventually caught by Instagram and penalized. Your engagement levels increase temporarily, but you’re ultimately caught by Instagram and punished.
When Instagram is evaluating your account, and deciding how influential you are, it doesn’t just look at your number of likes or followers. The Instagram algorithm considers both of those metrics together.
This means that if you have 100,000 followers, but only 20 likes on each post, something is going to look wrong. The balance between followers and engagement is one of the biggest reasons why it’s so important to earn your followers authentically, rather than investing in both accounts.
So, what’s the deal when you buy Instagram likes?
After all, it can’t be a bad thing to have too much engagement, right?
If, like most companies who buy Instagram likes, you decide to go the bot or automated route, then you’re putting your entire social strategy into the hands of a robot. Unfortunately, though artificial intelligence is getting a lot savvier, it still can’t grasp the concept of “context.”
Your Instagram likes bot will be there to simply “like” posts, regardless of what they’re about, or what content they show. Most services work by simply tracking a specific hashtag. This means that you risk “liking” countless posts that your brand doesn’t want to be associated with, just because a specific tag is present. Over time, these problems with context can do irreparable damage to your reputation.
The non-human nature of the bots and automated accounts that dole out Instagram likes means that spotting #Fake content is incredibly easy these days. For instance, here are a few signs that your favourite brands might buy Instagram likes:
- Minimal follower activity: Look through the profiles of the account’s followers on Instagram. If their fans don’t do much – other than like that brand’s posts, then this is a good sign that they’re fake accounts.
- Poor user engagement: If a profile has an insane amount of likes on every post, but not a massive number of followers, something fishy is going on. Keep the like-to-follower ratio in mind.
- Check if specific services follow the account: If the brand has connections with websites where you can buy Instagram likes, that’s a huge red flag.