Scaling online marketing campaigns are at the core of most successful business endeavors in recent years, but they can be tricky to pull off. One of the easiest and most worthwhile ways to go about them, however, has proven to be by purchasing pre-owned social media accounts.
This is a practice that has quickly started rivaling other well-known approaches, but that can also be used alongside most other strategies. If you’re just now starting to look into pre-owned social media accounts, if you have questions about its legality or how to pull it off, or if you’re curious how to combine it with other scaling marketing strategies, we’ll try to answer all these questions below.
What Are Pre-Owned Social Media Accounts?
The first step of understanding pre-owned social media accounts is quite simple, as they are exactly what they sound like. These are accounts other people have created and built from the ground up, gathering followings of thousands or often up to millions of people over the course of several weeks, months, or years.
Those accounts are then sold on various online platforms, either because their original creator didn’t need them anymore or because they had initially created them with the idea of eventually selling them off. Many such accounts are made as funny meme accounts as those can garner followings rather quickly, but funny or not, they also tend to focus on specific niches. This is to the buyer’s benefit, as it allows them to pick accounts in the same or adjacent niches to that of their own business.
Once you’ve purchased a pre-owned account, you can rebrand it and use it however you like. A portion of the pre-established following can be expected to fall off when they notice the change of ownership and direction of the account, but that’s usually a small percentage of the whole. Exactly how many people leave and how many stay depends on how well you’ve picked the right account to buy and how well you manage it afterward.
What to Do Once You’ve Bought a Pre-Owned Social Media Account?
Simply buying a pre-owned account is the easy part, as those usually sell in the range of several hundred dollars for an account with tens of thousands of followers (or several thousand dollars for an account with over a million followers). Once you’ve got your account and you’ve rebranded it accordingly, however, it’s time to manage it adequately too.
Much of that isn’t dissimilar to managing and developing a social media account you’ve grown from the ground up yourself. It’s a matter of building engagement, fostering trust in your brand, directing traffic toward your sales channels, and more. Trust is a big part of the whole process, as you want your pre-established audience to stick around.
At the same time, you also want to use the momentum you’ve gathered by buying an account too, so, it’s best not to waste time. Combining the purchase of pre-owned social media accounts like other strategies is key because of that. Hiring influencers from Shoutcart or other similar platforms, arranging ad campaigns, hiring a good content management team, and so on are all viable strategies that can work very well in tandem with the purchase of one or more pre-owned social media accounts.
Is Buying Accounts Legal?
Buying pre-owned social media accounts is legal in most countries as of the writing of this, including the US. Some social media platforms don’t appreciate it and try to prevent it, but it isn’t illegal. Still, it’s best to go over your country’s or state’s legal code on such matters to be sure.
When Not to Buy Pre-Owned Social Media Accounts?
The one drawback of this strategy is that it is frowned upon by certain people as it’s seen as disingenuous. Whether that’s the case or not doesn’t change that perception, and in some niches, it can be difficult to build up your brand reputation if you’ve purchased a pre-owned account. These are often indie spaces or niches predominantly followed by people leaning to the left on the political spectrum.
In such cases, it’s usually better to focus on more traditional online marketing strategies. Working via ad campaigns, building up your own social media accounts and generating content, as well as working with influencers you’ve hired off of Shoutcart or other platforms are all strategies that can help you build up your brand’s presence and trustworthiness without purchasing a pre-owned account.
Even in the best of cases, however, this is going to take a while and just purchasing a pre-established account is going to be faster. This is especially true if you want to establish your brand’s presence on several social media platforms at the same time. So, it’s always worth it to consider just buying one or more social media accounts instead.