The Truth About Buying LinkedIn Followers: Impact on Growth and Credibility

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Can you buy LinkedIn followers? Sure. But it has very high risks, learn more with this guide.

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The Truth About Buying LinkedIn Followers: Impact on Growth and Credibility

Buying LinkedIn followers will turn you into a temporary celebrity, but it might get your account banned.

So, before you buy your next LinkedIn follower, ask yourself what is best for you: vanity metrics or sustainable LinkedIn growth.

Today, we’ll show you:

The risks involved when you buy LinkedIn followers

Whether users can detect if you’ve bought LinkedIn followers

The right way to grow your LinkedIn account

First, let’s see if you can buy LinkedIn followers for your business page or personal profile.

What LinkedIn Metrics Can You Buy?

Some of the metrics you can buy for your LinkedIn profile or business page include:

Followers

Likes

Comments

Skills

Endorsements

Recommendations

Connections

When you buy any of these, the service providers deliver them using bots, fake accounts, or click farms.

Those who claim to provide real accounts have platforms or partner networks where they

Advertise your profile or pages to LinkedIn users for engagement

Offer LinkedIn users rewards for engaging other LinkedIn accounts

Why It’s Not a Good Idea to Buy LinkedIn Followers

Service providers claim buying LinkedIn followers is perfectly safe. However, paying to boost followers, likes, comments, or connections comes with considerable risks.

Let’s see what are the risks of buying LinkedIn followers and what you can do instead.

1. You Risk Losing Your Account

Buying LinkedIn followers, likes, comments, skills, and endorsements violates LinkedIn’s User Agreement. If caught, you risk your account’s suspension or permanent ban.

In this case, you have to start from scratch. Set up your profile or business page, reconnect with people, and create content to build your audience.

2. You Get Low-Quality Followers

You’re most likely buying fake and spammy accounts or bots. Even if the followers you buy are real users, they’ll have no interest in your profile, content, or what you offer. This will damage your organic reach and engagement, defeating the purpose of buying followers in the first place.

3. It Can Destroy Your Reputation and Credibility

If you have 45,000 followers, but none of your posts gets more than six comments, very soon, people will discover something is fishy with your account.

Once users discover your followers are fake, they’ll doubt the rest of your profile—endorsements, skills, recommendations, and posts. They might even remove you from their network and discourage others from having anything to do with you. It’s negative branding for your profile.

If you sell products or render services, this can drastically reduce your sales.

4. It Messes Up Your Analytics

You can’t accurately measure the impact of your content when most of your followers are fake.

For example, it’s tough to identify which content drives the most engagement from your audience when this audience is full of fake accounts and bots.

This means you can’t improve your LinkedIn content strategy because it becomes difficult to tell what works and what doesn’t.

5. You Have to Keep Buying New Followers

LinkedIn removes fake accounts through automated detection. Your number of followers will go down shortly after the purchase.

To maintain the illusion of a thriving LinkedIn account, you have to keep buying new followers, which can quickly become costly.

Depending on the service provider, you have to pay between $180 and $210 for 5,000 followers.

Can People Tell if You Buy LinkedIn Followers?

Having many followers on LinkedIn could indicate that you have a solid professional presence and influence within your industry. But that’s not the case with paid followers, and other people can easily tell the difference.

Here are the obvious signs that your network is made of bought followers:

You keep losing followers. Every day, LinkedIn fights hard to clean its platform of fake accounts. Once LinkedIn discovers fake accounts linked to your profile, they'll remove those accounts alongside their comments and engagements. So, when users see that your followers have suddenly dropped from 66,000 to 12,000, they’ll know you’ve been buying followers.

Low engagement. Let’s say you buy 50,000 followers, but your posts only get 15 likes or comments. The significant difference between your followers and engagement rate shows your network that something is wrong.

Generic or irrelevant comments. Most of the comments from bot accounts will be gibberish and unrelated to your posts. Users will notice this trend quickly and understand that those engagements are fake.

How to Grow On LinkedIn without buying followers

You can expand your LinkedIn network and get more followers by focusing on the quality of your network and the relationships you build.

Engaging with people who don’t share the same interests as you or don’t fit your business ICP makes no sense.

To grow on LinkedIn:

Create good content: The most effective way to attract and retain your target audience is by creating engaging content that educates them, highlights their pain points, and answers their pressing questions.

Avoid these costly mistakes: Being inactive, spamming people with your pitch, and not allowing users to message you are some of the common mistakes you must avoid.

Build relationships with the right people: Use LinkedIn search to find your target audience and send them personalized connection requests. Reply to comments on your posts and participate in relevant groups.

Leverage free tools. Build your LinkedIn audience with Taplio’s free tools. Generate carousels, format your posts, check the best time to post, write your headline and more!

Need more tools to boost your reach on LinkedIn?

Taplio offers a 30-day free trial for each of its plans. Take advantage of its AI-post generator, 3M+ and growing lead database, advanced LinkedIn analytics, and engagement management.