Watching a dog run around in circles trying to catch its tail can be a great funny video to share with your friends. However, there’s nothing funny about being that foolish dog and wasting your time running around in circles trying to achieve an impossible goal.
Keep this simple analogy in mind the next time somebody tells you buying likes, views, shares, or plays for your brand’s social presence is a waste of time.
Building a brand is easy if you have a big audience base waiting to engage with your brand and its unique product or service.
Acquiring this large audience base is easy if you have a strong, popular, and visible brand.
Guess the dog catching the tail analogy is beginning to make sense now.
Play the Game to your Advantage
It’s nobody’s case that you can just buy your way to social popularity. Only a combination of a good product/service, quality content, and sustainable messaging efforts will give you a real shot at social marketing success.
What buying likes for your Insta updates or votes for your Twitter polls or views for your YouTube videos will do is that it will take care of the perception management part of social marketing.
Numbers matter. Period!
Wonder what happened to all that talk about Instagram hiding likes on posts? There was a lot of talk about platforms coming together and hiding numbers so that people stop obsessing about them.
Such trials petered out because, ultimately, numbers matter. They matter in the real world and they certainly matter on social media. Nobody really cares whether your posts have more ‘real’ likes, whatever that means, as compared to ‘paid’ likes.
All people do is just look at the number and form instant conclusions depending on whether it seems too high or too low. And ten times out of ten, posts with high metrics will enjoy more credibility than those with low numbers.
Nothing to Lose—Just Try!
There’s no point being too conservative about experimenting with your social marketing strategy. Any and every tactic is fine as long as it boosts your brand’s visibility and gives you a bigger platform to market your product or service.
Remember, something as inane as JCB machines at work became a viral sensation in India for a few months in 2019. If #JCBdigging can be a viral hashtag, then certainly your platform will survive even if your experiment with bought likes or views or shares or plays doesn’t work out as you planned.
