I just read "Fake followers are hard to shake" over at AdAge . Yeah, buying followers is tempting. Sure, it might look good on the surface, to have hundreds or thousands of followers. I've had many, many people ask me about buying followers. I think is a waste of money. First, why? If your social media efforts are for a business, fake followers aren't going to come to your store. They don't engage. They don't add any value. Then there are all the recent efforts to purge fake accounts. If your follower count drops massively after one of the follower purges, you're outed Lastly, as this article points out, there are fairly straightforward ways to determine how many fake followers you have. If your goal is to become an influencer, or gain business leads, tools are coming that will out the buy followers tactic. I expect that, in the not too far distant future, the various algorithms will easily detect copious numbers of fake followers. And I expect that