By Tom Andronas
Small business owners, do you know who owns your business’ social media pages?
“Of course we do, we own them,” you might say. But I’d suggest you check again.
On more than one occasion recently I’ve dealt with clients who simply don’t own their own business social media pages, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn.
“How can that happen?” I hear you ask. It’s disturbingly easy, and usually involves nothing sinister.
We’ve found that sometimes small business owners who might be a little bit older (with the greatest of respect), and perhaps not as familiar with social media as their younger staff, might ask an employee to take control of their business’ social media pages.
That employee sets up a Facebook Business Manager account to manage the business’ Facebook page, Instagram page and ad account. They might set up a YouTube account, Linktree account, LinkedIn company page and Mailchimp account.
That employee assigns admin rights to the business owner, then proceeds to run the socials quite successfully for a while.
Then that employee leaves the business.
“No problem,” you say, knowing you have admin rights to everything.
And you’re right, you probably do.
But because that employee probably set up the Facebook Business Manager account using their own personal Facebook account, possibly used their Gmail address (or set up yourbusiness@gmail.com) to set up the YouTube account, and inevitably has the LinkedIn company page attached to their personal page, you may have a problem.
That problem is that while you as the business owner may have admin rights to your pages, you may not actually own them.
Now, if you know who it was that set all those things up, you should be able to sort things out reasonably easily by reaching out to them and arranging the relevant ownership transfers.
Problem solved.
But if that person left the business in acrimonious circumstances, or perhaps it was all set up so long ago that you’ve forgotten who did it, then you potentially have a very big issue.
“Why is it such a problem?” I hear you ask.
Well, for a business like ours, which might need to claim some element of control of your business’ social pages to post content or run ads, it makes getting those approvals next to impossible. It also causes enormous headaches for you, the business owner, trying to work out who did what and when, in order to regain ownership of your assets.
But more importantly, the reality is that a third party, who is no longer associated in any way with your business, actually has control of your business’ communication assets. That means they have the power to decide who has access to the page, have the ability to post on your business’ behalf, and at the absolute worst, the ability to remove your admin rights from your own business’ social media accounts.
The real-world risks and potential consequences to this are almost unthinkable, but very, very real. The possibility that a disgruntled former employee could completely destroy your business’ reputation through one venomous, but very public Facebook or LinkedIn post, is terrifying.
The good news is that this is an easy situation to avoid, but it requires the business owner to be switched-on to the establishment of social media assets, ensuring they’re set up properly in the first place, and maintaining some sort of log of who has access to what.
Lastly, it’s critical that login details are stored using secure software, are changed regularly, and use two-step authentication linked directly to the business owner’s phone or authenticator app, in order to ensure everything remains secure.
