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If you own a business, it is highly likely that over the course of the past ten years you made the decision to establish a presence on Facebook. After all, Facebook claims there are 1.4 billion active accounts on the social network platform, so it would seem like a logical move. It is also likely you have granted several individuals access to administer and post from your branded account. Do you remember who has access? Have former employees had their access revoked?
Facebook’s Dated Page Admin Processes
Until very recently, the only mechanisms for managing branded Facebook pages were tied directly to individual Facebook user accounts – people had to log into their personal Facebook account to access your brand’s page. For many Facebook Page managers, this presented a problem as they really did not want to have their social life and their work life mixed together and visible on Facebook. Some people, and quite a few social media managers at agencies, have gone as far as to create “dummy” Facebook accounts in order to help alleviate this problem.
If you use or have used an outside agency to help manage your Facebook presence, then it is likely that individuals within the agency were granted access to your page through their personal account – this means that if they leave the agency, you have no guarantee they have been removed as an administrator of your account. The same is true for former employees and interns who may have been assigned to work on your Facebook presence. Even if this does not represent a problem, at least everyone can agree that this does signify some level of risk.
The Process Exposed Brands to Great Risk
The recent news about high profile “hacks” of prominent celebrity, business, and government social media pages illustrates the need for paying attention to security. While “hacking” normally involves people external to the business and includes techniques like phishing to steal login and password information, there is also a clear and present danger from former employees or associates. Anyone with full administrative privileges over a Facebook page can, in a matter of seconds, exclude other admins and essentially hijack the page for their own purposes. There are numerous instances where disgruntled former employees have sought vengeance using their Facebook admin privileges. Established and thriving Facebook groups have been deleted, messages have been posted to social media profiles that are harmful to the brand, and entire profiles have been hijacked. Many, if not all, of these instances could have been prevented had there been a proactive focus on security and maintaining proper access control.
Take a look at your Facebook business page and see if you really do know all of the people who are listed as having admin roles. You may find a mixture of former employees, previous interns, and a few people from agencies you might have worked with over the years. As someone who works at an agency and has had admin access granted on hundreds of Facebook pages, there are obvious signs that there is not much attention being paid to procedures, controls, and monitoring of access to business social media accounts. Given the state of the tools to grant and support administrative access to Facebook pages, it is understandable that controlling page access has become a little bit unmanageable.
Facebook’s New Solution
Facebook recently introduced a new tool, Facebook Business Manager, to assist businesses with managing their presence on the platform. It provides a flexible way to provide administrative access to both individuals and agencies without having branded pages tied to personal accounts. It has proven to be great for those businesses that have multiple individuals working on their Facebook presence or who utilize the services of external agencies for social media management support.
The truly great thing about Business Manager is that it not only covers both advertising administration and page control, but it will actually let you grant permission to an organization to work on your page. Hello convenience, and good riddance to all of the strange agency personnel names listed under the Admin Roles on your business page. This tool puts you back in control of your page and provides you with a new layer of security.
Community Elf has been using Facebook Business Manager for the past few months, and it has really improved the efficiency in our services to our clients. The initial setup may be a little daunting for those who are not well versed in Facebook page management, but the ease of administration and the ability to grant and request access directly from within Facebook Business Manager is well worth the difficulty of setting it up. Kudos to Facebook for providing a great tool for the businesses that use Facebook to connect with the 1.4 billion active users on the platform. Now, if we can only get them to revisit the organic reach problem again.
If you have any questions about Facebook Business Manager, please ask. We now have experts ready and willing to help you get it set up.