LinkedIn Guide

9 Reasons NOT to buy LinkedIn Followers in 2024

Thinking of buying LinkedIn followers? Here are 9 reasons why it’s a bad idea to buy LinkedIn followers. Find out the best ways to grow your network naturally.

Saurav Gupta
Founder & CEO
August 9, 2024
Table of contents

A massive following on LinkedIn, huge followers and connection counts, that’s what everyone wants.

This might tempt you to think, “Hey, what if I just buy LinkedIn followers?”

By spending a bit of money, could you…

  • Instantly become a LinkedIn influencer?
  • Get 1000+ likes, connections and prospects?
Gif showing follower number increasing

Well, the answer is “No.”

I’ve got way too many reasons that make it a horrible idea to buy LinkedIn followers.

For you, I’ll stick to 9 key points, so stick around and let’s discuss,

That’s right,

I won’t just leave you after telling you not to buy any followers.

In fact, I’ll teach you the best ways to grow your network personally.

Why me? Because I’ve grown my LinkedIn followers from 0 followers to 12k+ in just 4 years without buying a single follower.

Screenshot of LinkedIn profile with high followers

And now I’m helping people do it at a faster pace.

So, let’s skip the small talk and dive straight into it.

Why is it a BAD idea to buy LinkedIn followers?

If you’ve checked out some sites that offer LinkedIn follower boosts, I’m sure they tell you it’s perfectly safe.

        

And that’s not the end of it..

There’s so many problems with buying LinkedIn followers that I could just barely cap it at 9 reasons.

Starting with the biggest and most obvious,

  1. Your account will be BANNED

It’s against the LinkedIn policy to buy followers or artificially grow your account.

If caught, your account will be banned.

Screenshot of LinkedIn account restricted page

I don’t need to remind you that if your account gets banned, you’ll have to start all over from scratch.

Not a great trade-off.

  1. Your brand’s reputation will be destroyed

Picture this: A potential client sees the huge number of followers on your account and checks out your profile.

Graphic showing a real profile vs fake profile

However, all your posts and engagements are suspiciously low. Clearly, you just bought followers to fake your numbers.

All your credibility and brand reputation just went down the drain in under two minutes. That client will never trust your business now.

Gif indicating going down the drain
  1. You only get LOW-QUALITY followers

The sites that sell LinkedIn followers obviously don’t have access to real accounts, they’re just fake spam accounts and bots.

That means they won’t do any LinkedIn activities, like, comment, endorse or any sort of engagement.

LinkedIn easily notices this and can ban those fake accounts.

This will hurt your own reach and push your posts further down the algorithm.

And also prevents actual humans from seeing your account.

  1. Your account analytics will be messed up

Let’s say you bought 10k LinkedIn followers off some popular site, your profile now looks like you’ve become a great LinkedIn influencer.

However, your engagement will still be limited to any real followers on your account.

On site it’ll look like a huge number of followers, but there won’t be any likes or comments.

Meme of account with high followers but low likes

Your engagement analytics will look really weird.

As a result, you can’t test out any growth strategies or see results.

  1. Your followers will automatically go down

We’ve made it clear that buying LinkedIn followers fills your follow list with a bunch of fake accounts or bots.

Well, it’s a matter of time before LinkedIn tracks them.

And once those accounts get banned, they’ll disappear from your follow list.

Your follower count will just keep getting lower.

What can you do? Buy more followers? It’s like throwing money into fire.

Gif indicating wasting money
  1. It’s a wasted investment of money

Your profile needs to get clients or offers, which is why you’re trying to boost it in the first place.

However, buying followers is straight up just a waste of money.

Since none of the fake followers offer any real value to your network.

Fake bots are not going to be interested in your product pitch or buy a subscription to your SaaS plan.

So what’s the use investing in it?

  1. You might get scammed

A simple search to buy LinkedIn followers has tens of thousands of results, but they all offer services at your own risk.

This means you could get scammed. That’s money gone you’ll never see again.

Even then, those fake followers are not built to last. So you’re basically getting scammed in a way regardless.

Review of follower sellers scamming users
Source: Reviews.io
  1. You miss out on the learning experience

Growing your LinkedIn account from 0 followers to 12k+ is an inspiring adventure.

There’s a lot of lessons you can learn from every connection.

Screenshot of LinkedIn profile with high followers

Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.

The more people you know, it gives you chances to learn more about their work.

This helps you boost your knowledge and strategies within your own industry.

Each follower opens the door to their 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, increasing your accounts visibility on LinkedIn.

  1. Your brand won’t grow

Reaching your target audience on LinkedIn is not an easy task. It takes a good plan and execution.

When you have fake followers, your company will not grow at all.

A bunch of fake bots does not give you any reputation in the industry, just a fake illusion of credibility.

I’m pretty sure you’ve got a good idea on why it’s such a bad idea to buy LinkedIn followers now.

Can you get away with it from the LinkedIn Police? Well…

Is it legal to buy LinkedIn followers?

It’s an easy ‘No.’

The LinkedIn Policy specifically restricts it.

Besides, buying LinkedIn followers is tricking people into trusting you.

It’s unethical as well.

You’re basically faking your account’s credibility to any prospective clients or businesses.

If- nay, when your fake follower count is found out, people could easily report you or raise a ticket with LinkedIn.

And I guarantee that this will get your LinkedIn account banned.

Judge slamming hammer

Can people tell if you buy LinkedIn followers?

Yes, anyone can tell if they try.

Sites sell followers in packages of thousands. This goes into your account within days.

How often have you seen a person grow their account to 10k followers in just a week? Never.

It’s extremely obvious that it was artificially boosted.

Additionally, people can see the lack of engagement or endorsements on their profile. This is also a dead giveaway that can ruin your brand’s reputation.

So after all these disadvantages, you’re probably wondering,

Are there any advantages at all to buying followers?

Stewie and Brian saying ruined

Are there any advantages to buying LinkedIn followers?

I know we said its a really bad idea. But I’d rather not be biased.

Let’s see if there are any notable advantages,

  1. Your follow count gets an instant boost

By just purchasing a pack of followers, your LinkedIn profile immediately looks popular.

        
  1. It gives credibility to your LinkedIn account.

Having a lot of followers make your account look trust-worthy,

But it could also completely backfire.

If you’re found out, your credibility takes a steep dive and will likely never recover.

Gif showing a failed dive
  1. It’s a huge time-saver

It definitely takes time and effort to grow your LinkedIn network. Not everyone has that luxury.

That’s why most people opt to buy LinkedIn followers.

How to grow on LinkedIn without buying followers?

You and I both know buying LinkedIn followers is not the way to go.

But how do you grow your network legitimately?

It’s a different ballpark entirely.

It’s worth it though, since you’ll start seeing real followers, connections and leads.

This brings you so much business value and industry insights.

How, you ask?

Explore. Endorse. Engage.

This “triple-E” combo is a great way to get your LinkedIn account noticed and get real connections.

Suppose you’re looking for a specific job role and country, it just takes a few clicks.

LinkedIn Search filters
  • Endorse: Once you connect with people, a great way to get their attention is by endorsing their skills or interacting with their posts.

It takes less than 30 seconds to go to a LinkedIn profile, scroll down to their skills and hit the endorse button or interact with a recent post.

LinkedIn endorse button

If you haven’t connected with them, you can just check out their recent posts and maybe leave a like and comment instead.

These small actions will still put your account in their radar, warming them up for you to pop the question.

  • Engage: Someone has to make the first move, and it’ll probably be you. You’ll have to send out connection requests and follow people on LinkedIn.

To grow your LinkedIn account, you must first be active and engage with people on all their activities.

It could be a birthday wish or just a connection request, but it’s a stepping stone to an influencer account.

The important part about asking people to connect is the personalization, you can’t just send out a generic message to every prospect.

Now, I know this is a time consuming task that will likely take up a lot of effort and yield results pretty slowly.

If you’re a CEO of a startup or a busy head of sales, you just don’t have the time to spend going around LinkedIn liking posts.

Enter Salesrobot.

Salesrobot will completely automate all your actions on LinkedIn and grow your network without an ounce of effort.

What can it do?

Salesrobot will,

  • Automatically view profiles based on your search criteria
  • Send out connection requests
  • Use hyper-personalized messages to appease every prospect
  • Send follow-up messages automatically at scheduled intervals
  • Automatically like posts, endorse skills, send birthday wishes and insightful comments with AI.

All it takes is 2 minutes to set up your first campaign on Salesrobot and get those connections rolling in.

  1. First, click on Create Campaign.
the first step you need to perform to create a campaign using Salesrobot.
  1. If you’re a beginner, you can use our advanced SalesGPT AI to guide you through the process.
how to create SalesGPT campaign.
  1. SalesGPT will ask you questions to get an idea of your target persona and their pain points to get the perfect connection messages.
the buyer persona created by SalesGPT chatbot.
  1. You can enter a LinkedIn Search URL or import from Sales Navigator or any other list to find your target profiles for Salesrobot to contact.
where you need to input the LinkedIn search URL or LinkedIn sales nav.

And well, that’s it. Your campaign is ready!

Now you can sit back and relax for 24 hours as Salesrobot brings in plenty of new connections, followers and prospects.

Relaxing gif

All of this is available on Salesrobot’s cloud-based platform which you can get with no extra installation.

It even goes the extra mile by:

  • Giving you a dedicated proxy IP address;
  • Offering options for warming up your profile to make it seem more human-like.
  • Having a Safe mode that automatically sets limits to your LinkedIn activities.

You don’t need to decide immediately, we offer a 14 day free trial with no credit card or phone numbers required.

Quality vs Quantity: Should I buy LinkedIn followers?

Buying LinkedIn followers is not a good idea.

We’ve gone through plenty of reasons why but here’s the gist,

  • You will lose all credibility and reputation.
  • Your LinkedIn account will most probably get banned.
  • Bought followers are really low-quality. They’ll eventually get auto-removed.

Basic business rules are to try and make a good investment, providing returns over time.

When you just buy 1000+ followers on LinkedIn, it does not have any business value.

But just a few real interested people would.

SalesRobot brings that.

On one hand, you’d spend anywhere from $30 to $100+ to get a few thousand followers on LinkedIn that get deleted and put you at risk of a ban.

On the other hand, with just $99 a month in Salesrobot, you could be getting over 3-4 new clients each month consistently and streamline your growth.

You don’t need to take my word, just check out our glowing reviews on G2.

Positive review highlighting that SalesRobot works
Source: G2

So if you’re looking for quality followers and reliable LinkedIn growth, give Salesrobot a try.

Good luck!

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