50 – 60k fake followers! Should a digital marketer resort to this?

Whenever I am browsing through social media, I come across handles, profiles and pages that get described as digital marketers. Seriously, who does not want to become a digital marketer? It is now so easy thanks to technology. But then fake followers give impression of success, sometimes they are no results afterwards.

But then, it is a hard journey, because any business that will want to endorse you as a digital marketer, is very much interested in your fan base. The number of followers you have is perhaps the first thing any business will check when they visit you social, if not, digital profiles.

I look at those profiles of digital marketers, influencers, artists, if not upcoming artists, bloggers and so on, mostly of Cameroonian origin and I am like, God, when will I ever reach such a follower base so I could also take ambassadorial or digital marketer deals. But then, I close my eyes and I continue working, because I know it is a long journey.

If you are not making sense of anything I am saying yet, let us briefly look at who a digital marketer is:

What is digital marketing and who is a digital marketer?

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.

So basically, a digital marketer is someone who uses digital channels to reach customers, build brand awareness and promote the products and services of a company. Not to confuse with a brand ambassador though. Post on Zamani’s Blog

What does a digital marketer do?

Like we have said earlier, a digital marketer will use digital tools to reach out to customers. That means that having a huge fan base can easily earn you the role of a digital marketer. Now let’s look at what he does and how he does it.

1. Social media marketing

This is probably the most prominent method used by a vast majority of brand influencers in Cameroon. It is very easy to setup actually and most Cameroonians interact easily on social media. With this, digital marketers use channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and others to promote brands. That requires masterminding smart and relevant content campaigns to attract more customers

2. Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing describes anything to do that involves your company website’s ability to attract, engage, and convert users. Typically, this involves filling your site with the kind of interesting and useful content—thought leadership articles, helpful blog posts, and so on—that appeals to the audience you’re trying to attract. These should be thoughtfully conceived and written to either rank highly for commonly searched queries or have a catchy enough hook that your audience will share them through other channels.

In this case, you as a company has a digital marketing expert that handles all your digital profiles. He takes care of your entire digital marketing campaigns

3. Email Marketing

This is probably the most professional way to get to your customers. It might not very well apply as stated above that Cameroonians are much aware of social media instead, email marketing should not be neglected. As a digital marketer, you should really learn how to write professional emails that capture the attention of potential prospects.

4. Content Marketing

A part of inbound marketing, content marketing refers to high quality content creation and developing a comprehensive content strategy. A content marketing specialist would specialize in creating compelling content across any number of different forms and channels, including articles, videos, podcasts, social-media posts, and much more.

5. Per-per-click PPC

This method is very simply in concept, yet very hard to execute, because you need to run ads where you know it will be most profitable. A digital marketer can easily resort to this to make huge sales.

There is a quite a number of things that a digital marketer should be able to do. I will make new post on that only, as my main focus today is on fake followers that some potential digital marketers resort to use.

Each of the social media applications that we have today have what we call and application programming interface API that permits other programmers to build and run apps on those social media platforms. What we no simply call bots. It is now easy to change every aspect of your profile by allowing these bots access.

That means that you could change the actual number of followers to reflect what is not real. a study indicates that 5–30% of the Twitter followers are fake. This is because each time you browse on somebody’s profile, what catches your attention is the number of followers, the fan base of that person.

But then, what are companies actually looking for in digital marketers and brand ambassadors? A fan bas which they can command! Like i said, when I look at a profile, I look at the followers and I try to make a relationship between that number and the reactions you get each time you make a post.

As a digital marketer, should you resort to using fake followers?

Before you give a quick answer, think of this, as a digital marketer, am I useful to the brand with this particular number of followers indicated on my profile? Are new customers adopting the brand? Are old customers still faithful to it? The simple truth is that any digital marketer that presents a fake follower base is killing himself. Look at how;

1. Your credibility is lost

A company that employs you expects results especially new customers, if not repeated sales. So how can you achieve this with a fake fan base? That is practically impossible as there is no one to convince to buy those products and services

2. You will look desperate

That is true for me anyways. Each time I see someone that has done that, I have that feeling that they are trying to impress people and make others feel that they are not working hard, no do they have the knowledge on how to reach that fan base level. At the end of the day, you as a digital marketer in him self is fake.

3. You lose potential customers.

I feel that that is normal as who will really want to hear from someone by whose very nature is fake. You have created doubt in customers and potential customers mind. That is how you lose them and if you are a company, you should not do that.

4. You lose potential collaboration opportunities

If you are a freelance digital marketer and resorted to this strategy of fake followers, then probably your first customers that trusted you will give you lots of bad reviews. Because you have created an environment of doubt, simply nobody will take you serious. Worse of all if you are a company, investors will not trust you.

5. You will get a red flag on your account

Social media giants aren’t dumb. They have been in business for too long now. They can easily detect if your account has fake followers, and they will definitely shut it down. Facebook alone suspends millions of users a day for suspicious activity, and having an unbalanced follower/engagement ratio is one reason why your account could get suspended.

To conclude, digital marketing is a field in which everyone can get into. With a simple phone and data, you are free to go. However, digital marketing is one field in which cheating is not allowed as the price could be very heavy on you. Resorting to fake followers is a no. Do not try it, not even out of jealousy for your brother that has been in it for years and has gradually seen his fan base grow.