I wish to profit off of a Facebook fan page.

February 23, 2013 2:22 AM

I started a facebook fan page five years ago. I hadn't looked at it in a while, and upon seeing it again I find that it has accrued over 120,000 fans. I am the sole administrator, and I never posted as the page. I am not above selling the page, or getting paid to post ads as this page. How would I go about doing this?
posted by Philipschall to computers & internet (9 answers total)

As in, how could I get some financial gain from this?
posted by Philipschall at 2:24 AM on February 23

You can't sell something you don't own. You are a customer of Facebook, not a partner who has access to a slice of their revenue. That being said, why do you have fans? If you have something to offer these people that they will want to pay for, external to Facebook, then by all means start selling it to them.
posted by Seymour Zamboni at 3:10 AM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Second hit on Google reveals that according to their legal page, you cannot do this.
posted by Specklet at 3:18 AM on February 23

Terms of service aside, yep, you can find buyers for something like this. This is the reason for those "can I get a like for this child with cancer" posts you see. You could also go and present yourself to local businesses, offering to help them with their own social media strategy. Offer them a like back and a recommendation post for $x. You can change the page name easily enough to "local recommendations" or what have you. You should get your clients while you still have 120k followers to show them since you will lose followers as you start making irrelevant posts.

So. Yes you can monetize this, but mainly in pretty unethical ways. That may or may not be a problem.
posted by Iteki at 4:23 AM on February 23

What is a fan page for? If it's some celebrity- or media-related, you can try monetizing it with affiliate advertising disguised as timely announcements, like "Celebrity X's latest move is now on Blu-Ray!"

Even that might be against Facebook rules, and probably won't amount to much, anyway. Facebook "community" pages don't post to followers' newsfeeds like "official" pages, so people will only see your "announcements" if they look at the fan page.
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 6:57 AM on February 23

You can change the page name easily enough to "local recommendations" or what have you.

You can't actually, not if you have more than 200 likes. Facebook is extremely stingy about letting you change a page name for just exactly this reason. They don't want a ton of people liking a page and then having the page owner changing it to something completely different.
posted by magnetsphere at 7:25 AM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Sell t-shirts through something like Spreadshirt. Advertise it on your Facebook page.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:09 AM on February 23

Why do people like the page? What are you selling to them? You have an audience, at least for now, so sell them what they want.
posted by J. Wilson at 8:40 AM on February 23 [1 favorite]

One very simple way to sell the page (legally): set up a website to go with the page, sell that website and the Fb page with it. Facebook likes are cheap, though, so unless the page has a lot of organic activity, it may not be worth very much.

(full disclosure: I work for a company that handles sales like these.)
posted by third word on a random page at 3:23 PM on February 23