Selling your Social Networking or Social Bookmarking account
(by a guest writer)
Ethical or unethical?
This page isn't a moral judgement. Suffice to say
that the biggest companies in the game trade social networkers. Netscape once
offered top Diggers huge sums of money to move over to their own social
bookmarking site.
Power Networkers regularly sell accounts even though many Social Network
communities do not allow this. The most blatant type of trade is with
MySpace accounts.
Whether it's on Craigslist
or webmaster forums, the ad usually boasts the number of friends
and how long the account has been active. But Myspace isn't the only culprit,
there are Facebook Bebo and other profiles available for purchase. And these
trades are exceeded in volume only by those for social bookmarking accounts.
If you are good at building relationships through communities, account
selling
is a really easy method to make you some money. It doesn't take
long to build a large "friend" list at an SN site and, if running multiple
accounts, can generate a steady income. (Note: There are also several
programs that offer to drive up the number of friends you have. Use them at
your own risk)
Account terminations
Note that social media sites do often terminate accounts. Multiple accounts
from one IP may raise some flags and get an otherwise good standing account
deleted. Note also that many of the social bookmarking and networking sites
don't play softball. There's usually no warning, no polite cease and desist,
no email to tip you off.
Why buy an account?
If you are wondering
why someone would be willing to pay for accounts, the answer is
simple: promotion.
With the cost of email marketing lists on the rise, social sites are a very cost
effective way to get a list of people to market to, or get a story/site a lot
of visitors.
Do professional, big name marketing companies buy MySpace accounts? Hardly
likely for these reasons: The profiles that usually come up for sale are not
the Tier 1 IDs but rather the more mediocre ones. As such, the strategy of
buying profiles to assimilate the back catalogue of friends or reputation has
a major drawback - the ratio of effort to benefit. A couple
thousand friends on MySpace will not do a whole lot for any business, you need
friends in the hundreds of thousands to make any serious difference.
MySpace is not the only community this will work with by
 the way. You can
build power accounts on virtually any social community, with some of the best
being sites like Digg.com,
StumbleUpon.com,
Propeller and
others. Any site that allows you to build contacts, friends
or reputation will do just fine. In fact, it even works for forum accounts,
particularly those where a higher post count matters and those where there
are other collectibles e.g. trader points, member awarded reputation points
etc.
Building a power account is an expertise in itself. With Digg and
Propeller, for example, it comes from being good at finding cool
stories/sites/pages and getting a lot of people to agree with you that they
are worthy finds. Skills involved would include being able to find and friend
a lot of other members, networking with them to support each other's stories
and having a keen eye for attractive headline copy. Familiarity with the
process takes a while and account sellers may choose to rinse and repeat
rather than learn the ropes anew at a different site each time they sell an
account.
How effective is account selling as a business? Not very. The time required
to build an account to the point of someone wanting to buy it may not justify
the price for most people. However, if building a power account is something
that you'd be doing anyway in the normal course of your day, or you have a
power account and an overdraft that needs to be cleared, hey, advertise it for
sale. A few forums allow these posts and there are other avenues but stealth
is very much the cornerstone - or risk losing the account altogether.
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