Editor’s Note: Photofocus is proud to welcome Rod Harlan to our team of authors. Rod will primarily focus his efforts on helping visual creatives find more success.

I was conducting a seminar at a very large convention a few years back where I was showing the audience how they could see what Twitter accounts had fake followers so they could identify them as spammers and stay away. Sadly, I used the twitter handles of several of the conference speakers besides myself as an example and I exposed a few of them as having massively fake followers! I knew immediately what had occurred. Those speakers who had not spent time on their social media presence had tried to take the shortcut of buying their followers for appearance sake.

Don’t be seduced by the follower numbers you see posted by your competitors! Gaining followers today is simple with automation tools and buying services, but it’s pointless if those accounts are fake or not interested in connecting with your brand. To get the most out of your social media accounts, focus on quality, not quantity.

The number of followers you have doesn’t mean anything unless they’re doing something for you (from a marketing perspective, it’s also great to just make friends). It’s not enough to have followers on your Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook accounts, you need them to be interacting with you. Quality interacting occurs when a follower retweets, comments, participates in your chats, or promote your posts and tweets to their own social networks.