Access to your social media accounts is a very important item on the check-list of success that you need to pay attention to. Why? Because you have spent countless hours and money into creating a branded image and it’s important that you always have absolute control over your own brand and the accounts that speak your brand.
Here are some things to consider when you are preparing to have someone give you a little help with your online presence:
- Find ways to give the company access to the social media accounts without sending them your password. For various social networks available, there are ways to allow people access to your account with their own login, whether it is through a third-party application or via a setting that the social media website allows. Take Facebook for instance. If you have building out a business or professional page, you can make anyone an administrator of that page by adding their email or name as an admin. This allows you to give them access and then remove it when necessary. On Twitter, you can use various third-party programs available out there such as CoTweet, TweetDeck or HootSuite. With these programs, you can add your twitter or Facebook accounts and then allow others to use the accounts without having access directly. You may need to try out all three of these programs until you find the one that is right for you. Here’s a website that you can read that compares the two websites.
- Use an email address that forwards copies of emails to a list of people; your social media expert shouldn’t have access to the email. For all of your social media profiles, you will have to provide an email address. Be sure to use an email address that allows for the mail to be forwarded to multiple accounts while still storing the copies there. This allows you to discard the data in your own box but will keep copies of the data always. In the end of the relationship with your social media manager, you can remove their email address from the forwarding list and they will no longer get updates. Create an email such as networks@yourdomain.com and add a list of emails to forward the mail to.
- Ask your social media agency create ways to support your account without having to give full access. If they are in the business of social media, they should have some methods or knowledge of methods to be able to do the job without the access.
- Use only social media sites that offer tools for third-party authentication. It is more important to protect your brand than it is to use social media, so if you have to, consider not using social media sites that do not have an authentication method for a third-party to use.
- If it is unavoidable, pick a random, hard-to-guess password – one that is not related to you, your personal life, or your business in any way. Passwords are a necessity if you want to protect your data and if you want to have a strong hold on your brand. If you must share a password, follow these simple steps for creating a solid password that would take years to crack:
- Think of an old flame, under-dog on television or an arch-nemesis in high school.
- Think of a positive significant event that happened in that person’s life.
- Think of a phrase you might have heard if you were at that event from someone in the crowd (“way to go, buddy,” “will you sign my photo?,” “when are you going to date a sensible person?”)
- Pick one of those phrases (a shorter one will suffice). For example: “earrings and necklaces”
- Remove the spaces or replace the spaces with a dash or other punctuation: earrings-and-necklaces
- Visualize each letter as a number and replace the corresponding letters with its corresponding number for at least 1/5 of the letters: e4rrin95-4nd-neck14c35
- Make at least one of the remaining letters capitalized: e4rrin95-4nd-neck14C35
These are a few tips and tricks that should get you on the road with your social media management team. The most importantly tip is that you should insist that the accounts be created in such a way where you have absolute control over the material, content, and who has access. Change your passwords when possible and do not use a succession of numbers when changing them (i.e. e4rrin95-4nd-neck14C351, e4rrin95-4nd-neck14C352, e4rrin95-4nd-neck14C353).
Good luck and feel free to post here if you have any questions about specific third-party software or how to exchange content with your social media company.
Note: Please do not use the sample passwords listed on this website.
