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 to Help you Manage Your Digital and Social Media Assets
- 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)
- Ensure that the employee stores the login credentials in a centralized location (perhaps in Marketing or HR)
- Have clear rules about 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
- Undertake regular audits so as to keep track of growth and new areas where parts of your business may be experimenting – i.e. Google+
- If you have a LinkedIn Company profile – ensure that admin rights are limited to 2-3 employees. By default, anyone with a company email address can make changes
- Finally, there are a number of excellent enterprise grade content publishing tools such as HootSuite and Sprout Social – whilst not asset management tools per se they are ideal for having centralised control over publishing and responding.
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. Ideally you should look to do this type of scan at least every 6 months – as you might find out that you have a profile or presence you didn’t even know about.
Join Our Webinar – Managing Your Social Media Assets
Join Mark Parker for a free webinar as he discusses the points raised in this blog post and shares tips on how to get started.
