Everybody knows having a strong social media presence is a boon for any business. It is as much a fact of marketing today as TV advertising used to be 20+ years ago. However, establishing a solid social media presence is time-consuming and complex, so many businesses and startups rely on working with influencers instead of establishing their own social media presence. What if there was a third way to go, however? Sometimes seen as a tad controversial, buying a pre-established social media account can give you all the benefits you need to accelerate your startup’s growth without overinvesting, spending months developing your presence online, or risk failing. So, let’s take a look at how buying social media accounts can help your startup and what exactly we’re talking about when we suggest buying pre-made accounts.
What Does Buying Social Media Accounts Entail?
When talking about buying pre-made accounts on a given (or several) social media platforms, we generally mean one of two things:
1) Buy one account per social media platform to use as your brand’s main (and only) account on that platform. Ideally, the account you buy should already have a large following and be dedicated to a theme or topic that is as close as possible to your business’ niche.
This way, you will guarantee that as few followers of that account as possible will unfollow you once you rebrand the account.
2) Buying social media accounts even on the same platforms and dedicating them all to directly or indirectly promoting your brand and products. In this case, not all of these accounts will officially represent your brand but will merely advertise it.
An extra benefit is that you often won’t need to rebrand these accounts; you have to repurpose them. For example, if you’ve bought a popular account that posts memes, you can still use it as such, but you should also post memes that direct people to your products.
The extra drawback of the 2) variant is that buying more accounts means opening even more work for yourself, which startups usually want to minimize. That’s why we usually mean the first variant when talking about buying pre-made accounts. In either case, however, it’s important to make sure that the transition from the accounts’ initial purpose is relatively seamless so that you don’t lose followers.
4 Benefits of Buying Pre-Established Social Media Accounts for Your Startup or Brand
1. Get Off the Ground Faster
Speed in and of itself isn’t necessarily the most important factor for a startup, but it’s up there together with having a strong initial impact. Having a good impact on the market means synchronizing your various marketing channels, reaching a viral point, and being in a position to capitalize and build upon that market.
All of that becomes much easier and simpler if you simply buy a pre-made account with thousands or even more followers and use that instead of starting from scratch and investing in ads, content creation, and more.
2. Save Costs
Speaking of investing in ads and content creation, it also needs to be said that simply buying a pre-established account will almost always end up being more affordable than having to pay for ads and months’ worth of salaries for designers and content creators. Not only is the former faster, but it’s also more affordable overall.
There are multiple online marketplaces where businesses can purchase pre-established social media accounts. It is important to carefully research what accounts you buy and from where.
Of course, once you’ve bought the account, you’ll probably want to keep investing in it just as you’d invest in it if you had made it from scratch and spent six months getting it to this point. However, that initial cost will be lower.
What’s more, because you pay that initial cost upfront, you can budget it much more easily and accurately. On the other hand, planning a section of your budget for developing an account(s) from scratch is usually much less accurate as we never really know how much these things will end up costing exactly.
3. Corner-Off a Niche
This can be done with varying success and not always, but by buying pre-established social media accounts, you can have the opportunity to corner off the particular niche your business is in near-fully. For example, if there are only three big accounts on a given platform related to your business niche, buying all three of them and repurposing them to promote your business essentially gives you significant marketing control over that space.
4. Get Full Control of Your Social Media Presence
The other alternative to developing or buying social media accounts is to just work with online influencers and pay them to promote you. This is the other “easier” way to go about it, and it can work. However, it gives much of the marketing control to the influencers themselves and doesn’t always lead to the results businesses expect.
Photo by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash
