Selling Social Media Profiles with Your Website

by Luke Moulton 20 Comments

Many established websites have social media profiles associated with them such as Facebook pages, Twitter and YouTube accounts. Most social media services’ terms of service state that you can’t register and sell profiles purely for the sake of selling profiles. Selling profiles as part of a business, however, appears to be acceptable in most cases.

Selling associated social media profiles as part of your website sale is a great way to add value to your listing.

Below I’ve outline some strategies around selling your social media profiles as part of your website sale on Flippa. I’ve included the 3 most (currently) popular social media services, so if there are others you want to transfer, make sure you check with the appropriate terms of service.

Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages

Facebook’s help section states:

“There is currently no way to take away admin status from the creator of a Page. However, Page admins can add or remove other admins…”

Obviously this is far from ideal for the buyer. As the creator of the Facebook Page, the seller could remove the buyer’s admin privileges at any stage in future. As the seller, to provide the buyer with some sort of assurance that you won’t remove their admin privileges from the Page or make any changes to the Page.

Buyers: Don’t make Facebook fan pages an integral part of your auction valuation process.

Note: it’s against Facebook’s terms of service to sell personal Facebook accounts so don’t include them with any sale.

Twitter Profiles

While you’re not allowed to register profiles purely for the purpose of selling them, there doesn’t appear to be any guidelines around selling a Twitter account as part of a website or business sale. Twitter’s Terms of Service state:

*Selling user names: Unless you have been specifically permitted to do so in a separate agreement with Twitter, you agree that you will not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services for any purpose.

Should you decide to transfer a Twitter account as part of a website sale, we suggest you take the following precautions:

  • Change the email address to the buyer’s email address;
  • Change the password before sending the buyer the account details;
  • Don’t transfer an account that you have used for personal tweets;
  • Revoke any third party application connections from the Twitter Settings > Connections area:
    Twitter Connections Settings

YouTube Accounts

YouTube’s terms of service don’t mention any policy around selling accounts as part of a business or website, so at this stage, we’ll assume it’s OK to do so. Selling a YouTube account could be a great way to add value to your listing if the account has a good volume of subscribers, and more importantly, if the website your selling references videos from that YouTube account.

When transferring a YouTube account to a buyer make sure you:

  • Change your password
  • Change your email account to the buyer’s (after changing the password)
  • Remove any personal information and videos
  • Backup your YourTube videos (there are plenty of apps available for doing this)

Adding More Value

If you’re looking to add even more value to your website listing by including associated social media profiles, then you might want to check out a very cool service called KnowEm. Starting from $99, KnowEm will register 150 social media profiles on your behalf. If you’re selling a website that could potentially fetch a couple of $1000 then this might be an enticing bonus for potential buyers.

As I mentioned above, make sure you check with the appropriate social media service provider’s terms of service before you go transferring profiles, and remove any personal information from accounts. You should also notify profile followers that a new owner will be taking over the account.

20 Responses to Selling Social Media Profiles with Your Website

  1. Danny Batelic says:

    If you’re selling social media sites as part of your site package, make a walk through video of the social media sites,showing buyers that they are legitimate sites with “real” people engaging with you and not just “junk” followers to give the impression of a community.
    Like everything attached to your listing, make this transparent as well.
    It’s amazing how many people will buy multiple sites of you if you do the right thing the first time.

    • Luke Moulton says:

      From what sellers are telling me, it’s reasonably straight forward to transfer a list so long as you keep the same service provider.

      Good suggestion for a post though – I’ll look into it further.

      • Danny Batelic says:

        Luke is right. Selling a large list with a site is a breeze as long as the new owner keeps it with the same provider.

        Some buyers are concerned that they might not have permission to use the list, but if the list is kept with the same site, the new owner won’t have any permission issues, as people subscribe to sites on not owners.

    • debril says:

      I was checking in here to just to know how i can buy a website,but it still hard to understand why people do sell their sites..let me know

  5. NYThemes.com says:

    Great Article,

    I was wondering what is Flippa’s policy for including Flippa’s social profile as part of the website seller’s business sale.

    For example let’s say, i was to selling nythemes on Flippa, would i be able to include my Flippa profile as part of the website sale?

    thanks

  6. Leigh Kostiainen says:

    Hey thanks Luke, ;)

    Timely, since my site is listing tomorrow with a Fb and Twitter account attached.

    With the Fb account I have offered the buyer an option to become an admin as you suggest or to receive the graphics and FBML codes to recreate the page … none are ideal but until it changes we will work with what we have :)

    Cheers
    Leigh

  7. Amy says:

    When selling a site that includes a Twitter account, a lot of buyers really like it when the Twitter Tools plugin has been installed. You can set Twitter Tools to automatically submit a new tweet, every time a new WP post is created.

  10. Website Flipping Tips says:

    Luke:

    Great article. I didn’t realize you couldn’t sell a Facebook account. I like Danny’s idea of providing buyers with a walk-through of the social sites to “prove” the community is real.

    Travis

  11. Cominback says:

    We just listed a website with you this week. It’s our first one so we are still learning the ropes. I think we followed every suggestion we could get. Our fingers are crossed..
    With that said, knowing how to and how not to add our social media profile acctouns to our website auction will be very helpful and I agree, it should give potential buyers that much more incentive to buy.
    Not that we would raise the price for our current site by adding our profile accounts but how would you suggest a social media profile be assessed for value? Maybe that’s another topic=)
    Thanks for the advice everyone,
    Shane aka~Cominback

  13. Cathy C. says:

    The idea of social media trading made a more accessible terms of widening the promotional and marketing capabilities of certain businesses. Having a valuable media that consists a major informative and accessible details enable you to gain income through selling it to potential buyers.