Is it better than buying followers? Likes? Engagement? Or is it all a bow-wrapped scam?

We all know how hard it is to build an audience on Instagram. If you have a personal Instagram page, you know how hard it is to get new people to discover your content. You may even know how hard it is for all your followers to get to see your content. Heck - that's why you're reading this article.

If you are starting a company or thinking about getting started on a new project, the idea of starting an Instagram account from scratch may terrify you. And that’s understandable. Imagine having to start from scratch again. Imagine the grind of getting your first 100 followers, then your first 1,000. It takes a lot of time and effort.

It is so hard to build an audience that the idea of buying likes, followers, and engagement gets very tempting. You may even think social proof will help you. You might imagine having 20,000 followers is probably going to attract more people to your account.

However, you also know that buying followers and likes isn’t a sustainable way to grow your account. You know that it’s a risky practice and that it might compromise your account. But what about buying an existing account? You will not purchase likes nor followers. You will just buy an account with an existing community. You will only buy an account you can rebrand into what you do.

Buying an Instagram account appears to be the right compromise: you don’t have to start from zero, you get social proof, and you don’t have to deal with sketchy websites to buy followers and likes.

But just like any other shortcut, buying an Instagram account isn’t going to help you in the long run. It may even discourage you and penalize you and your business.

💶 How to buy an Instagram account?

There are several ways to buy accounts. You can do a quick Google search and visit marketplaces that will put you in relation with a seller. Some of these marketplaces are legit, some aren’t. Keep in mind that since buying accounts isn’t a practice that’s tolerated by Instagram, there’s nothing you can do if you get scammed.

You can also DM Instagram accounts that you would be interested in buying. This is a very common practice, actually, and lots of accounts will get back to you with a price. Of course, you want to target niche or theme pages; people aren’t probably going to sell their personal account or the account of their business.

In any case, try to target niche pages and theme pages. These accounts are usually created and grown with monetizing it in mind. You could also buy a theme page that’s in your niche. Let’s say you want to start selling supplements, then purchasing a fitness page or a diet page could be helpful for you as the audience you’re purchasing may be interested in the products that you are selling.

Keep in mind that buying and selling accounts is risky, and there is technically no way to make it perfectly safe. However, to be extra cautious, you may want to ask for the email address used to login to the account and the password of this email address. If you don’t do that, the seller will always have a way to get the account back using the “I forgot my password” feature. Once you have the login information of the Instagram account, and the email address linked to it, you can go ahead and change the email address linked to the Instagram account, change the password of the Instagram account. You’re done, the account is yours.

📸 Rebranding the Instagram account you bought

After making sure the Instagram you purchased is wholly yours, you are ready to rebrand the profile. You will go ahead and change the name, handle, bio, link in bio, everything. The account will now look entirely different from how it was looking before. There aren’t any limitations about changing the name, bio, and so on, and you should be able to customize every element of the account.

These changes can be seen by anyone on Instagram, on your profile, in the “about this account” section. Even if most people aren’t aware of that, and even if close to no one will actually check this information, just keep in mind that your rebranding can be visible. This is also a way for you to verify if an account you’re planning on purchasing has been bought and rebranded in the past.

🧐 How does a bought & rebranded Instagram account perform?

When you start posting from the account you just bought and rebranded, the followers might be confused because they did not subscribe to the account you are posting from. From there, they might end up looking at your profile and decide whether or not they want to keep following you or not.

In general, posting from a rebranded profile results in a drop in engagement. When you rebrand an Instagram account, Instagram limits your reach automatically, showing your post to a small portion of your audience to see how this small group engages with your content. If the engagement is terrible, the reach will remain low. If this portion of your followers engages well with the content, then it will spread more.

Instagram is careful about rebranding an account as the platform wants to make sure that you keep producing high-quality content.

A way to make sure your bought Instagram account performs better is to come up with a strategy to announce to your followers that you will rebrand. If you want to sell supplements and you just bought a fitness Instagram, keep posting fitness content and then announce that you will now sell supplements on top of that. Once you made the switch in content, you can then explain that you will rebrand. This way, the audience will be prepared, and they will understand why the account randomly changed name and content.

This will help with having a good engagement after you rebrand as your followers will understand what’s going on, then they won’t have to spend time and energy figuring out where this new content comes from.

Of course the best route is to buy an account that is in your niche already or very close to it. If you post about dogs, don't buy a fitness page for example.

🦺 Is it safe to buy an Instagram account?

As we’ve seen before, it can’t be 100% safe. However, if you follow the right practices I shared previously, you should be fine.

You have to be very careful with the account you will buy. Selling an Instagram account is a big business, and some of them are not genuinely legit. Some accounts are full of fake followers; some others are just the result of some aggressive follow-unfollow method. You want to make sure the account that you are buying is decent quality. To make sure it is, you should follow the account for a few days before deciding whether or not you should buy it. See how many times they post, if they generate comments, if they reply to comments, if the accounts liking and commenting seem legit or not. Pay attention to details to make sure if an actual community follows the account or if it’s just a bunch of fake profiles.

If you buy an account full of fake followers, you won’t get any results, even if hundreds of thousands of users follow the account you purchased. That’s the main trap people fall into when they get started at buying Instagram accounts.

Learn to create an audience instead

Buying an Instagram account is somewhat risky, and even if you don’t get scammed during the transaction, you might end up with an account that’s full of fake followers. Also, if the account is legit, rebranding it is risky, takes a lot of time and effort to be done right, and might not even drive the results that you want.

Wouldn’t it be more comfortable and more long-term to learn to build an audience instead?

I know starting on Instagram from scratch is hard; I’ve done it multiple times for clients. But this way, you can build an audience and a community that will likely convert in the long-run. If you want to make things happen quicker, take the budget you had to buy an Instagram account, and invest it towards Instagram Ads. This way, your growth will be faster and way better quality than what you will get from buying a shady Instagram profile.

You may buy a super high-quality Instagram account, but if you don’t know how to build a community, you will stay stuck anyway. So commit, learn about how you can create a community, start from scratch, spend a few hundreds in ads, and you will get better results in a few days than what you would have gotten in weeks of struggle, rebranding, negotiating.

Do you feel like you tried everything to grow on Instagram? Hopefully, what follows will be the last thing you will have to do to reach your goals.