Is Buying Backlink Packages, Facebook Likes, YouTube Views, and Twitter Followers Worth It?

If you had to make a list of some of the most valuable marketing assets available to your small business today, social media would undoubtedly be right at the top. Sites like Facebook, Instagram and others aren't just a great, efficient and cost-effective way to tap into a built in audience of millions of people around the world, but they're also an incredible opportunity to form a more organic relationship with your own customers than ever before.

That is, of course, if you've got the activity to back it up.

The fact of the matter is that social media isn't necessarily the "be all, end all" form of small business marketing. It's not enough just to have a Twitter profile. You need Twitter followers to amplify your message. Putting a video on YouTube doesn't really do you any good if nobody is watching it. If nobody is linking back to your own website, does that website really exist?

All of this demands the question: if you can't earn this type of activity organically (or don't have the time to wait for that process to pay out), should you just skip right to the chase and buy it all?

This, of course, requires you to keep a few key things in mind.

Is It Worth It? The Million Dollar Question

Many services out there exist that allow you to buy just about everything you need to truly establish your online presence - from backlinks to X number of Twitter followers to a guaranteed Y number of Facebook likes per post and everything in between.

In fact, you can get yourself a few hundred Twitter followers for a few hundred dollars (or less, in a lot of situations). Some of these sites are certainly more reputable than others and if you're thinking of doing this you should always shop around, but the point still stands.

By and large, you will get exactly what you paid for. You'll get your Twitter followers or guaranteed YouTube views or certain number of backlinks, etc. And in truth, you may actually see a boost in traffic to your pages, your content and your site because of it.

But the problem is that this boost isn't going to last.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that people misunderstand the value of these numbers in the first place. Backlinks affect your ranking on search engines like Google, yes - but the quality of those backlinks matters more than the number at the end of the day. You may immediately see your site rise in the SERPs, but after a few days you're probably going to go right back down to where you were again as Google realizes that the quality of those backlinks just isn't there.

The same is true of Facebook likes or YouTube views - most of which will probably be generated by bots (read: not actual human beings). If you pay X number of dollars for Y number of YouTube views but no humans are actually watching your video and digesting your content, what have you actually accomplished?

Not much, to be honest.

If a thousand bots all retweet your next Twitter message to their own network of thousands upon thousands of bots, your activity numbers may climb sky high... but what are you getting in return?

After that initial boost wears off, you're likely only going to find yourself right back where you started. This is why, among other reasons, it's important to let the process play out the way it's supposed to. Yes, having a massive number of Twitter followers will help establish yourself as an authority in the eyes of real people, but as the old saying goes... "Rome wasn't built in a day."

The arc of progress is slow, but it happens all the same. If you truly want to help your small business excel in terms of social media activity on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube (and with regards to SEO), you really need to focus on creating quality content and a lot of it. At that point, everything else will slowly but surely fall into place.

If you'd like to find out more information about whether buying backlink pages, Facebook likes and similar types of activity will truly help your marketing in Pensacola, or if you'd just like to speak with an expert, feel free to contact me.