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.