INSTAGRAM PROMOTIONAL SCAMMERS AND LESSONS LEARNED
Being a small business owner you have to be very careful in how you invest in your business marketing when you go online. We market our business currently through a few of our favorite channels - Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, and we always see an impact immediately when we create targeted marketing campaigns for our own posts. When you work directly with promoters who own Facebook pages with huge followings you want to make sure they got their followers organically.
We had been inactive on the Cookie Confidant Instagram page for a few days trying managing many local delivery orders. We decided to give another promoter a chance to grow our business. Their premium was much higher than we would normally paid for marketing and advertising. We thought the promoter’s different demographic could introduce our business to a more diverse audience and get us more likes and followers on Facebook and Instagram. After having our marketing post on the promoter’s page for over an hour, we received no new followers, likes, or comments on our marketing post which we paid a lot of money for up front.
We paid for these services through PayPal, and we requested for a full refund from the promoter. The woman who runs the promoter’s page removed my post + story but said “we could not get a refund because her boss already left with the money.” 😂 She said that “we can put a hold the money through PayPal” which isn’t true. We told to her “thank you for acknowledging that we can get our money back!”
I am normally a great judge of character 🥴, and I felt misled. I work with the three other trustworthy promoters, and the post promotions I put on thier pages causes activity on our Cookie Confidant Facebook and Instagram pages to immediately spike.
As a small business owner when you’re working with limited capital, it’s hurtful when you come across pages online that promote an artificial reach that you can be fooled to buy into. The lesson learned here is to make sure you research the promoters you work with, and ask them for references of happy business owners whose marketing posts were successful on their pages. It also helps to look at a promoter’s page followers, likes, and comments ratio on all post. Pay attention if the promoter only gets a lot of likes on selfie photos verses the number of likes on actual promotional posts. 💡