Purchasing Twitter and Facebook Followers by Isabel Eva Bohrer (March 13, 2012)

Title:

Are social media followers real?

First Impression:

When I think about Facebook or Twitter on buying followers, I think that these social media companies buy other companies to increase their followers like when Facebook bought Instagram and Twitter bought Vine.

Quote:

“You can’t buy real followers. They come to you.”

Reflection Proper:

As we all know social media is very popular these days, a research also concluded that if Facebook were to become a country with all its users, it would become the third largest country. Nowadays businesses and other products make their own page in these social media sites and try to gain more followers because with more followers they obviously have more sales, and some pages go trending in the Google search engine when that page has many followers, also some advertisements pay pages with many followers just to advertise their product. With followers on demand by many pages, some people purchase followers just to show that they are gaining popularity. Research shows that Facebook followers can be purchased for a very low cost like a commodity in the market. We must be very surprised by this fact that now we can’t trust the pages just with the number of its followers. But is all this ethical? This can be misleading to all people and advertisers who determine which site has a bigger impact. Jim Zhu, the founder of mycitycuisine.org advises to only trust Google Page Rank to evaluate the website’s popularity. I think that purchasing followers is not entirely wrong because it is good that there is an activity going on in your website but the downside of this is that the website is hiding the fact that the website has not been developed properly with real followers that are really interested in your page or website.

5 Things That I've learned (List down 5 things that you've learned from the article)

1. You can buy Facebook followers online.

2. Now you cannot trust how many real followers that page or website has.

3. Advertisers advertise their products to websites that has a lot of popularity.

4. Only trust Google Page Rank when looking for popular pages or websites.

5. Facebook pages that has many followers does not mean that the page is nurtured.

5 Integrative Questions 

1. What do you think the government can do to prevent this?

2. Why do you think people need many followers?

3. How do you think purchasing followers work?

4. Did you ever purchased followers?

5. What if you going to start your own business and you made a Facebook page for it are you going to purchase followers just to let people see that it is trending?