Recently I’ve had a number of customers express to me that they’ve lost track of a certain social media account – usually because the person who set up the account is no longer working for the company. Getting control of an account or reactivating a dormant account can be tough and time consuming.
This got me thinking about what simple steps a company (of any size) could take to retain and/or manage control of their social footprint.
The first point that is worth noting is that your social media accounts are digital assets – and we should adopt an asset management mentality when thinking about this.
Key Points:
- Create a digital asset register that tracks at least username, password, email account that is linked to the channel – ideally you should extend this to also map/track where content goes if it’s published via a channel – i.e. a Twitter account might feed off to a blog, Facebook etc.
- Have at least two people with admin rights over key assets
- Have very clear and simple language about asset ownership
- If the account is going to be used in a general way such as for customer service or as an expert contact be very clear that the brand owns the account (not the employee)
- Make it clear who is authorised to make profile changes to accounts
- Make sure the email account that “owns” the account is one that the company has control or access to. A password can be changed so make sure it’s a generic account (i.e. twitter-mark@mycompany.com). Take this a step further and ensure that the employee stores the login credentials in a centralised location.
- Undertake regular audits so as to keep track of growth and new areas where parts of your business may be experimenting – i.e. Foursquare, Google+ (post updated Dec 16, 2011).
Conclusion:
These are simple tips – in the first instance I’d ensure you at least do an audit and create a register of your companies social media footprint.
As an aside, we’ve undertaken a number of audits for our clients and will be formally launching an independent audit service in 2011.
January 29th, 2012 → 1:13 pm
[...] in 2010 I blogged about the need for organisations to take a more proactive role in managing their social media assets – a few of our customers were asking what to do when they lost track of specific accounts [...]