At the time
of writing this, Selena Gomez was on her way to reaching 100.000.000 followers
on Instagram. Miley Cyrus has over 52 million, and Jennifer Lopez a little over
51 million. Taylor Swift about 91.3 million and Kim Kardashian 83.4 million.
They themselves follow from 85 to 252 people – just rubbing it in.
Selena,
Miley, Jennifer and Taylor are pop stars so the huge amount of followers can be
attributed to fame (and other reasons which I will mention later). Kim
Kardashian, on the other hand, has no particular talent, but it’s a well known
fact that the reason she has millions of followers is….anatomic. Not to be
controversial, but I wonder about the level of intelligence of her followers.
It would be interesting to carry out a research on this topic, but there are
just too many followers, it would take a
tremendous amount of time and there are more important topics around than why
people are following Kim Kardashian’s “back”, to put it nicely.
The reason I
mentioned the number of followers of the above so-called VIPs, is because the
trend on the social networks seems to be to “follow whoever has lots of
followers”. In other words, the more followers you have the more you will get.
Is this really true?
What about
you? Do you follow people solely on the basis of the number of followers they
have? If so, why? Do you want to be seen by them, do you follow them just to be
part of the crowd, do you follow them like sheep…one jumps off the cliff and
the other follow.
Or do you
follow them because you saw the advertisement on your home page (Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter) and you automatically clicked on “follow”, regardless of
whether you like the person or not? Notice that I am now getting into the “other reasons”
I mentioned earlier. Financial reasons to put it mildly. This brings us to a
very important point. Are, all these
followers real, genuine fans or are they “bought”? You yourself may be a kind
of bought fan, because you clicked on the paid advertisement.
If you have
FB, Instagram or Twitter account, you will have received, or are receiving,
messages boasting that they can get you thousands of new followers, thousands
of likes and comments, thousands of “real” followers. REAL? I guess then that this means there are lots of “fake” followers
out there. Be aware that these offers you receive are not free. You need to pay
for the services.
It’s getting
more and more difficult to get your posts seen on Facebook, Instagram and
Twitter, so there is now a plethora of fake accounts offering paid
followers. They are the kind of accounts
now-you-see-them, now you don’t, that is, you barely manage to contact them,
pay them, get your followers and the accounts are already shut down. They are
illegal.
I have
noticed many of my friends’ accounts going from 300 followers or less, to 30
thousand, 61 thousand, and more! Just like that, practically overnight! What
happened, they suddenly went viral? No. They paid.
Why is it, I
ask myself, that peope pay to get more followers? I guess they think that the
more followers they have, the more popular they will become. But it’s also
because they think that no one will follow them. So they pay to get followers.
This all boils down to a low self-esteem. They would be better off to use that
money to pay for a course on how to become more confident.
There is
also another reason why people pay for followers, a very materialistic one.
It’s a matter of appearance. If you have 50 followers you are a loser. But, if
you have 50 thousand followers you are important, you are a person worth
following. Never mind that the followers are fake and paid for, and that they
have 10 likes and 1 comment (out of 50
thousand followers). What counts is the number of followers.
Companies though are getting smarter now, they think twice before sending products to so-called "influencers" or reviewers. They analize whether it's worth sending out free products, that is, do they get back something (more sales, more visibility, more whatever) in exchange for their freebies?
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