So far in our Securing Social Media series, we’ve seen that social media is a business-critical application category for many of today’s organizations—but is insecure and under attack from motivated threat actors.
We’ve also examined why social media accounts are so insecure, and the risks this reality creates for today’s organizations.
And we looked at why it’s so challenging to implement known security best practices to safeguard social media accounts.
Today, we conclude by showing how Cerby secures social media accounts by providing the control, visibility, and automation that allows:
- Marketing to conveniently leverage social media platforms to help organizations reach their goals.
- IT to keep the organization safe against social media-driven attacks.
Closing the app gap
As we’ve seen, three factors combine to make social media apps especially challenging to secure:
- Because they don’t support the necessary identity standards and user management APIs, social media apps exist beyond the control of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) systems.
- Social media accounts have unique usage characteristics, which complicate attempts to deploy traditional security measures.
- Unlike most other apps, which are managed by IT, responsibility for managing social media accounts often falls to the marketing teams (frequently leading to poor security habits).
However, with the proper controls in place, social media’s unique usage can be safely accommodated, and IT wouldn’t have any reason to delegate identity management to the marketing team.
Fundamentally, then, the primary obstacle to securing social media is the gap that separates these apps from an organization’s existing IAM and IGA infrastructure—close that gap, and each social media app becomes just another app in the technology stack.
The Cerby Application Network
The Cerby Application Network is a collection of pre-built and fully validated Cerby integrations for thousands of apps. Backed by powerful integration technology and built for enterprise scale, the Cerby Application Network extends the reach of your identity controls, enabling IT teams to:
- Bring every application under centralized identity control
Extend IAM and governance to social media and other disconnected apps that sit outside centralized identity management. - Keep access continuously aligned with identity groups and roles
Automatically synchronize user groups and permissions from your IdP or IGA so access stays accurate as users join, move, or leave. - Replace manual access work with automated, policy-driven workflows
Eliminate tickets, spreadsheets, and ad-hoc updates with lifecycle automation for disconnected apps. - Enforce consistent access and security policies across all apps
Apply the same standards, least privilege, role-based access, and MFA, across connected and disconnected applications alike. - Maintain continuous visibility and auditability
Consolidate access data and activity into a single view, simplifying audits, access reviews, and compliance while exposing shadow IT.
Securing social media accounts—while making things easier for the marketing team
As we stated in our first post of the series, marketing wants nothing more than to do their jobs, by:
- Using the tools of their trade, conveniently and without putting the organization at risk
- Spending their time on marketing activities, rather than executing identity and access management workflows
Of course, IT has responsibilities that include:
- Securing the organization’s applications and resources
- Supporting compliance and enabling incident investigations
- Increasing efficiency and preventing the errors that inevitably arise in manual processes
With Cerby, both groups can get what they need.
Automate lifecycle management (LCM)
Lacking out-of-the-box integration with IAM and IGA solutions, social media apps frequently force organizations (often the marketing team, specifically) to manually execute lifecycle management tasks, including the provisioning, deprovisioning, and permission management workflows associated with joiner/mover/leaver (JML) changes.
This work is very tedious and error prone, and seems to inevitably lead to poor security habits, such as failing to revoke access in a timely manner (or even at all). In fact, 58% of teams say former employees have retained access to systems after leaving the organization.
By closing the app gap, Cerby extends LCM and JML automation to your social media stack, dynamically updating access as users are onboarded, change roles, or leave, all triggered by your identity provider. One customer reported saving 3,300 hours annually on lifecycle management by automating these processes. For marketing teams, this eliminates the day-to-day hassle of manually adding, removing, and updating access across multiple social platforms whenever employees or agencies join, change roles, or leave.
As Alex Schuchman, CISO at Colgate-Palmolive put it when sharing their experience as a Cerby customer: “Social media platforms were designed for individual users, not for enterprise corporations... This solution allows us to treat social media platforms like corporate applications, subject to the same security rules.”
Make social media logins easy and secure with SSO-like access
In a modern IAM environment, core enterprise applications are typically federated using protocols like SAML. That’s what enables true SSO: passwords are eliminated, policies are enforced centrally, and users get a seamless login experience.
Social media platforms don’t work that way.
Most social and paid media apps don’t support SAML, which means they can’t participate in traditional SSO. Instead, they rely on usernames and passwords, pushing credential management onto end users and marketing teams, where passwords are often weak, shared, or rarely rotated.
Cerby closes this gap.
Credentials are still required, but Cerby centralizes control of them under IT governance. By taking credential management out of end users’ hands, Cerby securely vaults social media credentials, enforces app-specific password complexity policies, and automatically rotates passwords on a regular schedule or when access changes, all without disrupting users.
For marketing teams, the experience stays simple.
Users launch social media apps directly from their existing IdP dashboards, and Cerby automatically fills credentials behind the scenes. There’s nothing to remember, nothing to share, and nothing to reset. Cerby handles credential updates and rotations automatically.
The result is SSO-like access for platforms that were never designed for the enterprise, giving IT stronger security while keeping marketing fast and frictionless.
Replace individual-owned accounts with organization-owned accounts for more control
One of the biggest security gaps in social media comes down to ownership.
Most corporate social media accounts are tied to an individual employee’s email, phone number, or MFA factors. That makes access fragile and puts critical brand assets at risk when employees leave, roles change, or agencies rotate.
Cerby shifts social media accounts from individual-owned to organization-owned, similar to how IT manages service accounts for other critical systems.
For IT and security teams, this ownership model restores control. When the organization owns the account, IT can enforce security standards like strong password policies, regular rotation, and MFA, without relying on a single person to manage or maintain them.
For marketing, the impact is immediate. Teams no longer lose access when employees or agencies leave, don’t have to escalate to social platform help desks to recover accounts, and aren’t dependent on a single account holder to distribute MFA codes just so work can get done.
By moving ownership from individuals to the organization, Cerby removes a fragile dependency and creates a stable foundation for secure, scalable access, setting the stage for frictionless MFA enforcement, which we’ll cover next.
Add and enforce MFA, even on shared social media accounts
When multiple users need to access the same social media account, MFA gets in the way leading many marketing teams to disable this vital security measure or to share codes in insecure ways.
Cerby enforces MFA on social media accounts, so users can’t bypass or disable it for convenience, significantly improving security.
When combined with organization-owned accounts and MFA factors, this also removes the friction that usually comes with shared access. Instead of relying on a single account holder to receive and distribute one-time passcodes, MFA challenges are routed to organization-owned email or phone numbers and automatically handled by Cerby. Passcodes are securely auto-filled via the browser extension, so users can log in without delays or workarounds.
The result is stronger MFA enforcement without the bottlenecks and user frustration that typically cause teams to weaken or turn off MFA altogether.
Crucially, the same security and convenience applies to third parties.
As Siobhan Sullivan, Director of Global Community Marketing, Crunchyroll attests, this means “No more password or 2FA code sharing. No more calls to the account holder in Japan, Australia, or the UK in the middle of the night.”
Provide secure third-party access to social media accounts
Many organizations work with contractors, agencies, and other partners for a range of functions, and doing so is especially common in marketing, communications, and advertising.
However, one of the major challenges associated with working with third parties is the need to grant enough access for them to do what you need, but not so much that your organization incurs unnecessary risks.
Cerby addresses this problem by assigning time-bound access by role, revoking that access automatically when projects end, and rotating passwords behind the scenes to keep accounts secure.
Protect advertising budgets by preventing account breaches
Paid social media advertising accounts are high-value targets because to a savvy criminal they’re not all that different from a wallet. When compromised, the damage can hit both an organization’s brand and its budget. In fact, 22% of all online ad spend is wasted due to ad fraud annually.
But external attacks aren’t the only risk.
When paid media accounts are tied to individual employees, former team members can retain access to ad budgets long after they’ve left, simply because offboarding wasn’t executed perfectly. In these cases, access loss isn’t theoretical. It can translate directly into unauthorized or untraceable spend.
By automating lifecycle management and enabling you to implement security best practices like SSO and MFA, Cerby not only removes the burden of manual oversight, but also meaningfully reduces the risk of breaches or unauthorized spend.
“We chose Cerby because we needed a secure and centralized place to manage access to our paid social accounts,” Nina Donnard, AVP Paid Social at L'OREAL, shared with us, before adding “Additionally, the automated access removal of employees who have left the company provides a level of security we did not previously have.”
Gain individualized visibility into every social media session, even with shared accounts
Shared accounts for social media aren’t going away, but neither is IT’s security- and compliance-related need for detailed visibility into access and usage.
By centralizing access, Cerby attributes every login to a specific user, even when teams use shared social media accounts. Shared credentials no longer mean lost accountability.
For marketing, this makes it easy to identify who published or changed something, helping teams quickly resolve issues. For IT and security, the same per-user attribution enables faster incident investigations and reliable audit logs.
The result is full traceability across social media platforms that were never designed for it, without adding friction or changing the user experience.
Securing social media (and other apps!)
Are you looking to enable:
- Enterprise SSO integrations for any app, right from your existing IdP?
- MFA on any app, for a seamless and secure login experience?
- Automated identity LCM, securing and streamlining user access throughout the entire JML journey?
- Execution of governance actions and comprehensive data collection from disconnected apps, automatically incorporating them into your governance framework?
Then book a demo to explore how Cerby can help.
And if you’d like to learn how Cerby customers are taking control of their social media accounts, here are some useful resources:
- Crunchyroll Closes Identity Gaps Across Global Marketing Stack with Cerby
- How Colgate-Palmolive Secures Social Media Access with Enterprise-Grade Identity Controls
- How L’Oréal Secures Corporate Social Media Access at Scale with Cerby
Looking for actionable steps?
Securing Corporate Social Media Accounts: A Playbook for IT Leaders shows how to bring social accounts under enterprise control—without spreadsheets or shared passwords.
