Meta without shortcuts: why bought followers lower your reach

The offer reaches almost everyone who sets up a business profile: ten thousand followers for a few tens of euros, within a week, with no work. It is tempting, because the follower count is the first number visible on a profile. This article is about why it is also the most expensive number you can buy, and why after such a purchase reach usually falls instead of rising.

How it is really decided who sees a post

Meta does not publish the exact rules and never will. The procedure is nonetheless known in outline and behaves observably the same way across networks.

When you publish a post, it does not go to everyone. It goes to a fraction of people, usually those who last had something to do with you. The networks watch what happens: whether anyone stops scrolling, watches the video to the end, saves it, writes a comment, passes it on. Out of that comes a simple decision: show it to more people, or leave it be.

So the whole thing is a contest for the attention of a small group of people who decide on behalf of the rest. And right there is the reason a big number does harm.

Why bought followers lower your reach

Let us work it out on numbers, because that makes it clearest.

You have a profile with 1,000 followers, all of them real. 50 people react to a post. The engagement rate is 5 %, and that is a good number, one at which the networks will show you to more people.

Now you buy 9,000 more followers. You have 10,000 of them, but the same 50 people will still be the ones reacting, because the rest are empty accounts. The engagement rate drops from 5 % to 0.5 %. The same content, the same audience, a tenfold worse result on paper.

And worse than on paper: the test sample on which the fate of a post is decided is now assembled from ten thousand accounts instead of one thousand. Most of them will not react, because there is nobody behind them. The post fails the test and goes no further.

So you bought a number that is visible and paid for it with reach that is not. It cannot be undone easily: empty accounts gradually drop off your followers by themselves, but it takes months and some of them stay.

The same holds without buying anything

You do not have to buy anything to run into this. The same mechanism is why large profiles almost always have a lower engagement rate than small ones.

Larger studies show the same direction, even though their exact numbers differ according to who ran them and how they counted. In one study of more than twenty two thousand accounts the median came out around 4.7 % for accounts with hundreds of followers and around 0.7 % for accounts in the tens of thousands. Another study of more than four hundred thousand accounts gave different numbers but the same curve. Business profiles tend to be lower still, often under one percent.

That does not mean growing is a mistake. It means that there is no sense in comparing engagement rates between profiles of different sizes, and anyone showing you somebody else’s percentages as a target either does not know that, or knows and says nothing.

What happens when you try to get around the system

There are several ways and all of them have one thing in common: they manufacture reactions from people your content does not interest.

• Bought likes and comments. They arrive fast, from accounts with no history, often at night. That is exactly the pattern that can be recognised.
• Mutual liking groups. The reactions come from real people giving them out of obligation. They stop at the first image, do not watch the video and never save anything.
• Follow and unfollow. In the short term the number grows; in the long term you have an audience that reached you by mistake.
• Somebody else’s content with no credit. The fastest route to reach and the fastest route to having your account restricted.

The networks know these patterns, because telling genuine interest from manufactured interest is an existential question for them. If they could not, they would be swamped and people would leave.

Something else matters more, though. Even if it worked, you get nothing out of it. The goal is not to have reactions. The goal is that somebody remembers you three months from now, when they need what you sell. An account with manufactured numbers has nothing in anybody’s head.

Why an agency doing the same thing for a year is not an agency

The rules change constantly. What format gets space changes, how long a video the network favours, what happens to a post with a link in it, how a view is counted. These are not details; they change what is worth doing.

So it helps to know how to recognise somebody who is keeping up. You do not have to understand the networks; three questions are enough.

• What have you stopped doing in the last six months, and why? Anyone who has stopped nothing is following nothing.
• Which of our posts failed in the last month, and what did you take from it? In a healthy working relationship good ideas fail too, and it gets talked about.
• Which number do you make decisions on? When the answer is “reach and likes”, that is not enough. What is interesting is saves, shares, messages and orders.

A monthly report that differs only in its numbers and never in its conclusions is a reliable sign that nothing there has changed in a year.

What does work, then

The answer is boring, which is exactly why most proposals do not contain it.

First: talk about what you know. A company that fits windows knows more about windows than any copywriter. Show what a badly fitted window looks like. People will save that.

Second: count on a year, not a month. The first months are almost always weak and that is normal. Anyone promising you results within four weeks is promising numbers, not customers.

Third: ask for conversations, not numbers. Ten people who send you a message are worth more than ten thousand followers. Messages turn into orders; the number under your name does not.

Fourth: have a place of your own. A profile on a network is not even rented to you; it can be restricted or deleted from one day to the next and there is nowhere to appeal. The website and the contact list are yours. The network is a route to them, not a replacement for them.

In closing

A brand is built slowly for one reason: it is a memory inside somebody else’s head, and that cannot be bought or hurried. It can only be made by repeating something that was worth remembering.

If you take one sentence away from this article, let it be this one: everybody sees the number under your name, but nobody buys because of it.

Related reading

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