Having a strong LinkedIn presence is crucial for any business looking to build its brand and generate leads online. One important metric on LinkedIn is your number of followers, which acts as a signal of your influence and authority. For company pages specifically, having more followers can lend credibility and trust to your business. This leads many companies to wonder: can you buy LinkedIn followers for your company page? The short answer is yes, it is possible to buy LinkedIn followers, but there are some important caveats to consider.
Is Buying LinkedIn Followers Allowed?
According to LinkedIn’s terms of service, buying connections or followers on the platform is strictly prohibited. LinkedIn considers buying followers to be a form of spam, artificial inflation of metrics, and misrepresentation of a brand’s true reach. If LinkedIn discovers you have purchased followers, it may penalize your account by removing the fake followers, restricting access to certain features, or suspending your account entirely. So buying followers does come with certain risks from a compliance perspective.
Why You Should Not Buy LinkedIn Followers
In addition to being against LinkedIn’s terms of service, there are a few other reasons why buying LinkedIn followers is ill-advised:
- Fake followers do not engage – Purchased followers are bot accounts or inactive profiles. They do not like, comment on, or share your content, providing no meaningful engagement.
- No marketing value – Large follower counts may seem impressive initially, but fake followers have no real marketing value. They won’t convert to customers or provide word-of-mouth promotion.
- May damage credibility – Savvy LinkedIn users can spot fake followers, and this may undermine perceptions of your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness.
- Waste of money – Paying for followers nets no tangible business results, so any money spent on bought followers provides no return on investment.
Essentially, buying LinkedIn followers fails to boost your company page in any authentic, meaningful way. The inflated follower count will be comprised of bots and ghost accounts. For these reasons, purchasing followers is not a worthwhile strategy.
Ethical Ways to Gain Real LinkedIn Followers
Rather than buying followers, focus your efforts on organic tactics to attract real, engaged followers to your company page. This takes more time and effort, but results in higher quality followers that can actually enhance your brand.
Some ethical ways to gain LinkedIn followers include:
- Post valuable, relevant content consistently
- Engage with your target audience by commenting and liking their content
- Run LinkedIn ads focused on follower growth
- Optimize your company page SEO to improve discoverability
- Encourage current employees to follow your page and share content
- Participate actively in relevant LinkedIn groups and discussions
- Leverage partnerships, collaborations, and cross-promotions to expand reach
- Use LinkedIn’s Company Follower Suggestions to identify relevant profiles to follow
- Offer special discounts or promotions just for your followers
The key is providing value to your followers through content and engagement. This establishes trust and credibility that artificial followers simply cannot replicate.
Should You Ever Buy LinkedIn Followers?
Very rarely can a compelling case be made for purchasing LinkedIn followers. For most businesses, focusing on organic growth is the smartest long-term approach. However, one instance where buying followers could potentially make sense is when first launching a new company profile.
When starting out, your brand new company page has zero followers. This can look unattractive and discouraging to early visitors. So some brand new companies may want to purchase a small number of followers, such as 500, to initially populate their page. But extreme caution should be exercised here:
- Buy followers from reputable providers that offer “quality” followers, not pure bots
- Maintain a 95%+ organic follower rate after the initial purchase
- Buy once when just starting out, not continually over time
- Keep purchased followers under 1,000 to appear natural
Outside of this limited scenario, buying LinkedIn followers entails substantial reputation and compliance risks without any real payoff. You stand a far better chance of success by sticking to ethical, organic follower growth strategies.
Conclusion
While it is possible to buy LinkedIn followers, doing so violates LinkedIn’s terms of service and fails to provide meaningful benefits. Fake followers lack engagement and marketing value. Instead, concentrate on producing engaging content, networking within your industry, optimizing your page SEO, and running follower-focused ads. Invest time into growing your followers organically. This leads to higher quality followers that actually enhance your brand’s credibility and generate more leads over the long-term.
