The Truth About Buying TikTok Followers
The Background
When I first moved from Atlanta to Bangkok, one thing I really wanted to do with my TikTok content was bring in more viewers from the Bangkok area. To do this, I began to reference the city more in my videos, and I’d be sure to always set the location of each video to be Bangkok. This worked a little bit, but the majority of my admittedly few viewers continued to be from basically all over. I thought that just because I started referencing the city often in my videos, the viewers who were from there would begin to roll in. I was sorely mistaken.
The brutally slow or even negative follower growth after every posted video, along with the terrible Bangkok viewer reach, caused me to start looking towards other solutions. I was impatient and having a follower count barely over a hundred made me feel like my channel wasn’t going to be taken seriously. TikTok itself would sometimes encourage me to promote the videos in order to get a wider reach. I ignored the ads, as I had heard how poor quality the YouTube subscribers were when people promoted their videos on YouTube. I figured TikTok would be more of the same.
Finally at one point, TikTok offered me $20 in free promotion if I would spend at least $20 of my own. So $40 worth of followers for only $20, that sounded like a bargain I couldn’t pass up. I figured I could get Bangkok followers cheaper than what it would cost for US or UK followers, so perhaps this would be a great way to jumpstart my channel.
The Tests
I picked a few of my most-viewed videos and ran a TikTok ad campaign targeted at gaining followers over the course of 12 hours. I set the parameters to target all genders, 25 and over, located in Bangkok, with an interest in “Tech & Electronics”. I started up the campaign and excitedly refreshed the screen over and over, waiting for the followers to start rolling in.
It started slowly at first, but after about an hour the views and follows began to flow in. I checked out the profiles of a number of my new followers. These weren’t bots, these were for the most part, real people. I was very excited to see the number of followers jump by often a dozen or more at a time. Factoring in the coupon that TikTok had offered, the cost per follower worked out to roughly $0.06 each. I was gaining hundreds of followers from just this small ad campaign!
TikTok, of course, immediately offered another coupon as soon as the campaign was finished. I quickly jumped on it and ended up running two more small ad campaigns on some of my other videos. They mostly performed in almost the exact same manner, despite being different videos about different topics. I did think that was a little strange, but I didn’t realize why this was the case until a bit later.
Empty Audience
A few things threw me off about these new followers, but it took me some time to realize it:
- They followed all the videos I advertised at basically the same rate.
- Many of the accounts appeared to be from younger kids or elderly people.
- These accounts were often following many thousands of other accounts.
- The vast majority of these followers weren’t even viewing my profile.
Although they all watched the ad video and followed, very few of these new followers watched any of my other videos, saved, commented, or reposted. It all came to a head when I posted a brand new video after the ad campaigns. I figured all these new followers would see the new video and the view count would quickly jump into the thousands. However, when I posted it… Nothing happened.
The video didn’t perform any better than any of my previous videos. Those new followers, for the most part, didn’t care about it at all. I realized that instead of bringing in dedicated fans who were interested in my content, I had just gathered up a bunch of random Bangkok-based accounts from children and elderly folks who happened to follow just about everything they came across.
The Takeaway
As for my final verdict? TikTok did give me what I asked for, and that was followers. What it didn’t give me were actual fans, future view counts, or real engagement for my brand. Don’t get me wrong, I did get a couple people who viewed my profile, engaged, and watched a bunch more of my content. I’m grateful to them for sure. I also think a small ad spend like this can be useful as an initial tool to bump up your follower numbers so that your channel doesn’t look like a ghost town. But it just goes to show that real, genuine audience growth only comes from high quality organic content. There aren’t any shortcuts to be found here.
