The Hidden Security Blind Spot in Social Media

A compromised social media account can trigger an average of $200,000 in fraudulent ad spend, weeks of brand rehabilitation, and millions in lost customer trust, all from a shared password stored in a marketing team's spreadsheet.

Social media platforms have evolved into business-critical applications that shape brand perception, drive advertising revenue, and engage customers in real time. Yet unlike traditional enterprise applications, they operate outside the governance of identity providers like Okta or Microsoft Entra ID.

For IT and security teams, this creates a dangerous blind spot. With fragmented visibility, shared credentials, and inconsistent MFA enforcement, accounts remain vulnerable to takeovers, fraud, and brand damage. Meanwhile, marketing teams waste valuable time troubleshooting access and managing credentials, tasks that should fall under centralized policies, not manual workflows.

The solution lies in bringing these disconnected applications under the same governance framework as any other enterprise application.

How Global Brands Secure Social Media with Cerby

Protecting Brand-Critical Assets

For global brands, a compromised social media account can destroy years of trust and trigger financial losses through fraudulent ad spend. Colgate-Palmolive discovered this when attackers repeatedly compromised their hundreds of social profiles worldwide.

The consumer goods giant needed to treat social accounts like corporate applications, with the same security rigor applied to any other business-critical system. After implementing Cerby, they eliminated risky credential sharing entirely and enforced MFA across all accounts. Today, Colgate has a complete audit trail of access activity and automated password rotation that ensures every social media account meets corporate policy, eliminating the primary attack vector for account takeovers without requiring marketing teams to remember a single new password.

Centralized Control and Visibility

Manual processes and fragmented ownership make it impossible to track who has access to which accounts or what actions they're taking. For rapidly growing brands like e.l.f. Beauty, this visibility gap was becoming a major operational risk. The beauty brand had 65+ accounts spread across platforms, many tied to personal email addresses or controlled by various agency partners, a common reality as brands expand their social presence across product lines and regions.

Within two months of implementing Cerby, e.l.f. Beauty brought every account under centralized management. They replaced personal email logins and agency-controlled credentials with corporate identities and role-based permissions, giving IT complete visibility into their social media landscape for the first time. No more orphaned accounts, no more untracked access—just clear governance and accountability.

This kind of visibility transforms incident response and compliance reporting. Colgate-Palmolive now tracks exactly which teams and agency partners access their accounts, with real-time monitoring of posting activity. When questions arise about account changes or content decisions, their audit trail provides answers in minutes rather than days of investigation.

Freeing Teams Through Automation

Manual onboarding, offboarding, and credential management don't scale; they introduce human error at every step. e.l.f. Beauty discovered this firsthand when they calculated that administrative tasks like password resets and MFA setup were consuming over 40 hours per quarter. That's time their teams could invest in revenue-driving initiatives instead of wrestling with credential management.

Cerby's automation eliminated this operational drag entirely. New team members and agency partners get secure access in minutes rather than hours, while departing users are automatically removed across all platforms. L'Oréal's security team experienced similar gains, freed from repetitive deprovisioning tasks across dozens of platforms to focus on strategic security initiatives rather than reactive account management.

A Purpose-Built Solution

Why Traditional Solutions Fall Short

Social media accounts are high-profile attack targets and core to brand identity. Attackers don't need to steal sensitive data to inflict damage; they just need access. Account takeovers, fraudulent ad spend, and reputational crises can unfold in minutes.

Traditional identity and access management tools weren't designed to secure applications that operate outside enterprise SSO. Most social platforms don't integrate with traditional identity providers, leaving IT teams with a choice: lock down access and slow marketing to a crawl, or accept the risk and hope for the best.

The Cerby Difference

Cerby is purpose-built to solve this specific challenge. It brings enterprise identity discipline to disconnected applications, giving IT the control needed to enforce security policies, streamline operations, and protect the organization's most visible digital assets, all without impeding marketing workflows.

The Bottom Line

Leading organizations like Colgate-Palmolive, L'Oréal, and e.l.f. Beauty share a common approach: they no longer leave social media security to chance. These brands recognized that social platforms require the same governance and security controls as any other enterprise application.

For IT and security teams, Cerby provides a strategic control point for brand-critical applications that have historically operated outside enterprise security frameworks. It returns governance to IT without inhibiting marketing workflows, making everyone more effective and the organization more secure.