3 common types of social media admin headaches
For the purposes of this blog, let’s put aside the content creation, platform-specific best practices, and other typical social media how-to’s for a moment.
We’re going to focus on the undervalued administrative responsibilities that eat a lot more of your time and focus than most people realize.
User management, often dismissed as a dull task, is actually the unsung hero. While it’s not the core of what any marketer day to day is, it ensures team members, contractors, and agencies can seamlessly contribute to a brand's social media presence, especially for those managing several social media networks at once.
Headache 1 - shared logins
If you use Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest to engage with your customers, then you know the hassle of sharing logins with the team members who support these channels.
Maybe you use an enterprise password manager (EPM) like LastPass or 1Password to store and share your social media passwords today.
Maybe you share the passwords in one-off situations over chat or phone.
Or maybe you share the passwords in a spreadsheet to have a central repository for people to access.
When there’s a fire to deal with, you won’t have an audit trail to investigate who logged in with the shared username and password because these social media platforms were built for individuals, not for businesses that have a team to drive their social media presence.
Additionally, if you have two-factor authentication (2FA) turned on for your shared account (go, you!) but it is tied to your personal phone number, you become stuck in an endless loop of chasing and sharing codes. The last thing you want is to be the reason why your team can’t respond to customers in a timely fashion or engage in a social trend at the right place and time. Sadly, EPMs don’t account for this extra level of security, leaving you as the single point of failure, stuck in a repetitive cycle you just can’t escape.
Then, when it comes time to rotate passwords because someone leaves your team or you cut ties with an old agency, you have to:
- Update the passwords in your vault or wherever you store and share those passwords
- Reconnect all of your social media profiles to the rest of your social media management stack so you don’t have a gap in your data collection and analytics
The pain might not be too terrible with one or two shared logins, but if you manage 30, 300, or more shared credentials, you may as well open your favorite bottle of wine to get you through it.
Crunchyroll, most commonly known for streaming anime, has over 300 social media accounts to manage. How does their Director of Global Community Marketing manage them all? Read Crunchyroll's story here.
Headache 2 - onboarding and offboarding team members
If you access your most common work apps (i.e. email) through a single sign-on (SSO) dashboard like Okta or Microsoft, your IT team has already calculated the time savings of automated onboarding and offboarding, also known as automated provisioning and deprovisioning.
Unfortunately, you’re still left to do this manually for the social media platforms you manage because these platforms don’t integrate with their solution.
IT’s solution to automated provisioning and deprovisioning integrates with a human resources source of truth. That way, when someone new joins the company, the applications they need to do their job on day 1 are already available for them to access. This is what IT folks call “birthright access.” It’s access that is determined by their role in the organization.
Whether social media marketing managers focus on organic or paid channels, they ought to have birthright access to the social media platforms they are hired to manage, as well as the content creation and analytics technology that help them execute day-to-day.
Wouldn’t it be beautiful if new social media team members didn’t have to wait to be given access manually to all these tools? Additionally, if you’re a brand that does social media account takeovers as part of your influencer program, wouldn’t it be so much easier to automatically onboard and offboard your influencers rather than leaving yet another tab open in your brain to remember to remove access, rotate passwords, and close the loop?
L’Oréal needed a secure and centralized place to manage their paid social accounts. Why did their AVP of Paid Social, along with their security team, decide to go with Cerby? Read L'Oréal's story here.
Headache 3 - external agencies
“Can you provide us access to your social media platforms?”
That is the first question that every marketing agency and contractor you onboard ever asks you once you’ve signed a contract for them to help you with your organic or paid social media presence.
Whether your agency is helping you manage your organic or paid presence on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Google, or any mix of the above, sharing, updating, and removing access is extremely manual and inconsistent across the different platforms. Which individuals need to be invited into the business managers? How do I enforce our corporate security policy for shared logins? Who can be removed since they have moved onto other projects within the agency?
Do you really want to continually be disrupted with manually updating who has access to your social media accounts?
There has to be a better way…right?
In fact, there is! Fortune 500 companies choose Cerby to enable their team, contractors, and external agencies to support their social presence. Read more about our solution for social media apps here or book a meeting to chat with our team.
Honorable mention - terrible support for businesses
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been locked out of your account because you have a distributed team logging in and suddenly Instagram thinks you're a bot? This means those posts and videos that were supposed to launch? They’re delayed!
Who wants to be the bearer of that bad news?
Not only is your team handcuffed by this imperfect bot detection process, you’re at the whim of the support team for the social media platform. Then you have to embark on a convoluted path to regaining access to your account. Fast forward 30-45 days and it happens all over again.
These social media platforms were built to represent individuals, not companies. As a result, the bot detection that is supposed to help protect individual accounts? They impede your productivity as a team of social media marketers supporting a corporate account.
The business center for these platforms has inconsistent user experiences in managing business assets, which forces our teams to specialize in specific networks. It’s not a terrible thing to specialize, but it does make it difficult for someone who is in charge of sharing access across all the different platforms.
Conclusion
As more IT and security teams recognize that social media platforms are critical infrastructure for corporate communication, brand reputation, and customer loyalty, it’s time to get rid of these headaches. Centralize user management for social media and streamline administrative operations with Cerby so your team, contractors, and external agencies can do what they do best.
