When Social Media Backfires – Maintaining Your Ethics

Social media has an immense amount of power in today’s consumer market.  How many followers or likes a company has can often determine how many more they will get in the future.  For those just starting out with the social media craze, it can be daunting to know that they have only a few followers and in order to get more followers, they must have many people following to begin with.  It’s an overwhelming catch 22, especially if your company relies on word of mouth and customer recommendations.

Accusations Fly Regarding Followers

There have been some ethical gray areas for some companies and even some political figures when it comes to social media.  Newt Gingrich was accused of “buying” Twitter followers.  What this means is that either he, or the person in charge of running his social media, paid money to someone to create a series of dummy social media accounts with the sole intent of “following” the payee.
The supposed benefit of this is that often, the average Twitter follower does not have the time or the inclination to do any background research on someone’s followers. What they see and, more importantly, what they pay attention to is the number of followers in the social media account.  They use this number to determine someone’s social media influence.
While something that is, for lack of a better word, shady might be beneficial in the social media short term (ie. People see the number of followers and automatically assume a larger sphere of influence on the part of the poster), in the long run it can cause far more problems.

Why a Paid Audience Hurts Your Social Media

Purchasing followers is against the contract agreements of social media groups like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.  Essentially, should you be found out for having dummy followers, the social media site is within their rights to kick you off and stop you from being able to access that information.  Your social media account will be deleted.
When you purchase followers you are making a very clear statement that you prefer quantity over quality.  Having a social media follower that is highly engaged and supportive of you and your business/product is worth 50 dummy profiles that will not interact at all and will in fact hold the position only as a phantom number.

Consider the Effects on Your True Audience

The other thing to consider is that if you opt for the unethical option, what will your REAL followers think once they have learned the truth?  Do you think that your reputation will remain intact if it becomes known that you chose to purchase a hoard of fake fans than if you actually invested the time and effort to impress a group of people who will support you? It’s just not worth the cost.

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