One of the biggest pieces of advice that I offer to small business owners is to protect access to your digital assets just like you would the keys to the cash register. In this post I’ll walk you through what you can do today to protect your ass(ets).
What are digital assets?
I would count this as your Google My Business profile, social media profiles, access to your website, app management — anywhere where your business has an online digital footprint.
I’m all for delegating and having someone else manage your social media pages (obviously!) but I’ve seen quite a few cases where an ex-employee created or exclusively managed the business’ social media pages or Google My Business and when they left, no one had access. Always be open to delegating, but always, always be able to regain control/protect access to these pages as needed.
Protections To Put In Place
This varies a bit by social channel, and I’ll run through the ones I have personal experience with trying to recover, but keep a list of all of your profiles and who has access to what so you can change it at any time.
Apple/App Store
If you have an app that is in any way managed through the Apple app store, stop what you are doing and IMMEDIATELY make sure you have admin access. Like immediately. I worked for a company that had a third party manage the app as a platform, but the company still needed to log in in order to accept terms of use updates, etc. Getting back control of this when someone has left and your role doesn’t control assigning other roles is extremely time-consuming and stressful. It involves so much time and follow up and I promise you that you will thank yourself if you make this a priority today.
Now let’s knock out the most complex social channel: Facebook. First, make sure yours is the profile that is associated with the page and do an page roles audit right away. Anyone that is no longer with your company should absolutely be removed. Ensure every page role is a current employee and in the future make sure the page role you assign makes sense. Here is an easy to follow guide straight from Facebook that explains each role so you can decide which is the best fit for you to assign. Also if you have a private group within your page that someone else has created for you, chances are they are your sole admin. Make sure you have admin access (and therefore control!) over all parts of your Facebook page.
If you have lost control of your page (you don’t know your log-in, your profile isn’t associated with the page, a former employee you’re not in touch with is the sole admin) there are ways to get control of your page again, but it definitely takes time & troubleshooting and Facebook is rumored to be largely unsympathetic to these types of situations. No one fix seems to work for everyone and it’s a bit of just trying different solutions until you find one that works for you. If you are in this situation, please email me at carissa at pinkpunchmarketing.com and I will walk you through a few options that I’ve seen work in the past!
For Instagram, there is just one log in email address, so make sure it is one you have access to. Even if an employee leaves on good terms, do you really want to have to chase them down just to log into your own page, especially if there’s information you need to change or get out right away?
Since you can toggle between profiles on your phone app without re-logging in, always change your password whenever an employee leaves, even if it’s on good terms.
On LinkedIn, much like Facebook, you have a role through your personal profile for your company’s profile. Make sure you are an admin so that you can remove/grant access as needed. I will say that LinkedIn is the absolute easiest platform in terms of the support they give you if you’ve lost control of your page. They can help you find your admins and if you’re unable to get them to relinquish control, LinkedIn gives you steps to take (outlined really well here) to get control of your page back.
Twitter is a lot like Facebook in that you can assign account roles so that you don’t have to completely share passwords, etc. This Twitter FAQ page here does a great job of spelling out all the differences.
A Few Last Thoughts
If you have an SOP in place for when employees leave, absolutely add this to your checklist of steps to take. Just like you would always make sure you get your door keys back, remove admin access on profiles and change passwords if needed. Even in an employee leaves on great terms, it’s just bad business protocol for someone who doesn’t work for you to access to your company assets.
Any questions or need help getting your pages back? I’d love to hear from you!
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