So has anyone PAID money for exposure/advertise

[thomassayle]

I recently started posting on Instagram, not too long after I got contacted and asked if I was interested in paying for promo plans.

I'm new to Instagram, cheap and very suspicious. So I said I'll think about, The guy has 54k followers and the price is $10 - 2 story posts , there are other deals.

But my question is, has anyone experienced this? And should i do it? At first I was thinking it was like a scam/preying on new people.

I did think of contacting some of the artists he's promoting and see their experience.

[Caro]

I’ve never paid for this type of promo but this sounds mega shady.

When I had that number of followers (around 54k) I remember sharing and promoting my friends on IG stories and the conversion rate on their end was so low that it actually disheartened some of my friends. Definitely not worth $10. There are so many factors when it comes to promo that you have to consider that blindly paying someone with a perceived high follower doesn't really account for. Maybe if the follower count was in the 1mil range MAYBE. And even then you have to consider the possibility that they’re buying followers to fluff up their numbers. So still shady. I say just don’t do it.

Definitely sounds like scamming people who don’t know any better.

[MasterValkyrie]

It's always better to use the Instagram Advertising Tool. That's what I do. The estimated numbers that Instagram shows when you're setting up your promotions are extremely accurate. Sometimes you get more engagements than the estimated numbers. I recommend doing a minimum of $5 per day for 7 days, and if you like those numbers you can always increase the budget.

[Ninjaniksel]

It's very easy to just buy followers and do this. If you want to see if he's legit, check the engagement on his posts. Are people actually liking them, commenting and talking?

As mentioned before, the actual Advertising Tool works way better. It actually goes to real people scrolling Instagram instead of people who might not be active or even real.

[Kaydreamer]

His followers will be 95% bots. It's absolutely worthless to do this, and the people who are shilling this stuff are charlatans. Report those comments whenever you receive them. It's nothing but a scam.

[Llyrel]

Seconding what others said, it's very likely that this person simply got a bunch of bots to increase their number of followers and is now trying to trick people into giving them money with the promise of "promotion". Definitely a scam.

If you want to advertise your content, I'd suggest using Instagram ads or, in the case of comics, Topwebcomics (with ad spots costing as low as $1 a day) or ComicAd (which offers both free and low cost ads, starting from $0.01 a day).