Has anyone had any experience with buying or selling social media accounts?
Hi!
I am genuinely curious.
I am a social media & content geek and would love to buy an account to try some growth tactics and document the whole process, but when I started looking into it, most selling sites seemed too sketchy.
Some Q's
-Can you get banned by the site? Is there any safe way to do it?
-What's the best marketplace to buy-sell?
-Is it better to just DM the account and see if they are interested?
Would love to hear some experiences.
Thanks!
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I've sold and traded a few FB pages, FB groups, and Twitter accounts.
I agree with the advice of reaching out to owners. That is how I found most buyers. People still reach out to me this way.
Most sites that offered to sell social media properties seemed questionable. The only way to broker a sale of a social media account that felt semi legit was to sell it along with an associated domain name.
Many of the top domain brokers allow sellers to indicate which/if any social media accounts are included with the sale of a domain. I think this helps skirt the whole issue of directly buying the social media account, since technically you are buying a domain name and transferring the associated social media accounts as a "free" bonus.
Understood Casey, thanks! Makes sense what you say about the domains, do you have any reference of a marketplace?
I’d recommend reaching out directly to account owners, as a lot of the accounts on these marketplaces are pretty low engagement and there isn’t a great selection (at least last time I checked).
I’ve sold a few large Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. I reached out directly to businesses who seemed like that could benefit from owning the account and explained how it might fit into their business.
I agree, better selling it directly. Also keep in mind that buying and selling Instagram account is against their TOS, so another reason to do it as privately as possible.
I too sold an IG account with a few hundreds of thousands followers back in the days, but in that case I was organically receiving DMs with offers so I didn't had to do the reach out part.
It's also worth mentioning that the days of growing FB&IG accounts are long gone in my opinion. You can still do it on IG but there's a lot more competition and getting into the explore tab isn't as easy as it was years ago.
Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your answer! Direct selling sounds like the way to go.
Anyway, my idea with this is not to grow + sell the accounts as a business, I just want to experiment with some growth tactics, optimization... Mostly for fun and to share the experience.
In that case I’d suggest you to start a new account from zero because that way you can see what really works and what doesn’t.
Already established accounts have already been “categorized” by the algorithm based on previous behavior and your results could be influenced by that.
Understand, thanks for your input Andrea! Will probably do more than one experiment so might try both.
Thanks a lot!
Hey Gabe, thanks for your answer!
That's what I thought, reaching directly seems to be the safest approach.
You seem to have quite a business going around with this topic.
Are you growing theme pages? Also, when you sold the page, what was the "transfer method" if it is not too much to ask. Meaning, do you recieve payment first and then share account or what exactly.
Thanks a lot!
I’m not doing this anymore, but I had a bunch of large Facebook pages around different generic topics that I created way back when pages were brand new and grew virally on their own.
You could create a page called “Snowboarding” (fake example), literally post nothing, and see it grow to 100k followers simply because fb surfaced likes on the page in the newsfeed. Even liking that someone liked the page would cause you to like it and thus all your friends would see that you liked it in their newsfeed.. they toned down their algorithm a few months later.
The Instagram one I sold I had to put more effort into growing (like actually posting to it on a regular basis). I never intended to sell any of these, mostly just thought they could come in handy some day.
Anyway, yeah I’d always ask for payment first but would generally hop on a phone call and add them as a friend on Facebook so they had some level of comfort knowing who I was.
Hey Alex - having acquired & sold few pages as well, I'd double down on all the comments here: reach out directly.
As for the process by itself: it was always payment first; sharing passwords second.
I'd add one thing: get the people on zoom / the phone at some point. It's worth the time 10x in my opinion. My best deals [both ways] so far have always been when I created a true human-based relationship in the process; getting aligned with the people on the other side.
Awesome Kevin, thanks for your input. In your experience, was people really into selling the account or it took some time to find an account owner that wanted to sell?
Best deals definitely took some time; it's based on the 'human connection' part - after all there is no shortcut here [as far as I know at least] 😉
Have sold and bought a ton of pages on all platforms. The best deals I've ever gotten were from reaching out directly and lowballing on price. Most people don't know what their accounts are work. Ive used either a middleman or Paypal with Goods and Services
Hey Zach, thanks for answering! Sounds like the safest way is to reach out directly and do the "Good and services" payment on paypal.
Any bad experience doing it with this method?
Can't think of any bad situation where I did Goods and Service, but a ton of bad ones where it was F&F. Just make sure you have screenshots and the payment note explicitly states everything that's going down.
Thanks a lot for your advice! Greatly appreciated 🙌
I ‘sold’ a twitter account in the form of raising money for charity. I decided to use it as a means for raising money for an organization I cared about. TOS on most platforms does not permit the selling of accounts... another reason I decided to donate the money earned.
Hi Greg, makes sense, sounds like you did the right thing. Thanks for sharing!