You are jolted out of bed at 11:30pm by a call from your sales manager, telling you to log onto your Facebook account, FAST, and see what’s happening on the company’s Facebook Page. With your heart pounding, you jump up and try to login. You can’t remember the password for the business page and you never created a personal account for yourself. After several attempts to login, Facebook tells you to try again in 30 minutes.
We all know that prevention is the best medicine, but like backing up our computers, or putting a lock code on our mobile devices to prevent theft, we do AFTER we have experienced a crash or theft the first time. Our agency has heard excuses like:
- We have had several interns working on our social media over the years and we don’t know who set up what.
- The person handling our social media got a little heated when they read the negative comment and thought they would just handle it on their own.
- I created the 7 accounts because when I couldn’t remember the login info, I just created new ones.
- One of our former employees set up the account but I don’t think they added anyone else on before they left.
So let’s heed the warning BEFORE something happens on your social media accounts. Here are a few preventative measures to take TODAY that will save you a trip to the cardiologist:
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Have a central password document for your social media accounts, that the leadership team has access to.
This document can be kept in a private Dropbox folder, an encrypted Evernote file or an internal file that you, and the other carefully selected team members, can get to from home, office or on the road, quickly. While this seems obvious, most people do not have a central location with all the login information on their social media accounts, even for their personal accounts. Be sure to commit to keeping this document current.
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Have more than one admin added to social media accounts to prevent being “locked out.”
Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus, are all set up to allow you to create a BUSINESS page and then add others to manage it. If you are the only person on an account and you get locked out, forget your password, or get hacked, there is no one else to get in and resolve the issue. Another important feature that most of these accounts have is protected access levels. ADMIN status allows you to add or remove people, whereas an EDITOR on Facebook can only add, or edit content. They could not remove you from the page. Too many companies give everyone equal access and then have an employee go rogue and remove everyone from having access to the page. On tools like Twitter where there is only a single login, you can protect yourself by using a third party app like SproutSocial or Hootsuite. You can assign specific roles to your team members from that app without them having to have the specific Twitter login.
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Plan BEFORE, on who will be involved (more than one person) if a negative situation arises on your social media channels.
Discussion around how to handle negative comments is always helpful, but a written plan on who will be contacted in specific cases is even better. Can one person make the call on how to respond to a slanderous comment? Do you have a few preformatted responses to use as guides when things go wrong? If your account gets lots of customer interaction, you may want to consider customer service training for the staff handling your social media, and if you are open 24/7, be sure that social channel is also monitored round the clock. Nothing like coming in at 8:00am to a storm that started at 9pm and grew into an inferno!
Do you have a written plan? What will you do to protect your accounts? We’d love to hear your ideas, thoughts and questions in the comments below! If you need assistance managing the chaos of social marketing, contact us today.