One of the ‘hot’ topics in SEO at the moment is social media hits. A lot of businesses are now offering ‘authentic’ Facebook likes, YouTube views/likes and Twitter followers. These are not genuinely interested potential customers. Are they worth it? Will they help your social media campaign?

The short and simple answer is no, if you want to grow your business. After hearing a news article on the radio I did a little bit of research over the weekend (with an open mind). After searching through many websites offering the social media service I came to the conclusion that the service is not for you. One of the website I visited offers ‘5000 YouTube views for as little as £15′. What do you think? Affordable? Expensive?   If you are desperate for YouTube views then £15 is affordable (depending on how important YouTube is to your business.) However why pay for something you can get for free? You can 5000 views just from doing keywords research and implementing the relevant keywords and key phrases into your video.

It can be argued that buying these hits will damage your social media campaign. As Google is getting smarter it will penalise websites using ‘black listed’ SEO methods (examples include bought Backlinks and web pages that have 250+ keywords). It’s rumoured that this will start happening for social media campaigns. The other point to take into consideration is that Twitter is at war with fake Twitter accounts or accounts over spamming its community – they are getting very good at identifying fake accounts. So are you going to get the followers promised to you?

Social media experts and have a keen eye and can easily spot who has and hasn’t bought their audience and in the day and age we live in it is becoming easier for other people to be able to identify fakes. If you saw a YouTube video with 5000 views and no comments or likes/dislikes (any sign of engagement) would you think that the views are authentic? If you suspected that the views are fakes then how would you perceive the company? Buying an audience can damage your brand and your brand is everything to you. Do not be so quick to do something that could harm business.

Build a genuine audience and don’t take a cheap short cut. The result this way is an engaged online community of people that you have the chance to promote and sell your service or products too. Or would you prefer to buy an ‘authentic’ online community to kick-start your social media campaign?