Another 2 Mistakes Small Businesses Should Avoid with Social Media

Last week, I posted 5 Mistakes Small Businesses Should Avoid with Social Media. In conducting research on a client matter, I came across a 6th mistake.

And this is an important one, given summer-time internships.

• Don't let an intern handle your social media unsupervised. According to CIO magazine article, "Stupid User Tricks 7: True tales of extreme brain fail," a company allowed its summer intern have unsupervised access to the account and to the password. While the student worked at the company, he did not post anything inappropriate. But he did access the corporate Twitter account from his personal laptop at school. After he left, he (or his college roommate) continued to use his laptop to access and post to the company's Twitter account, this time with expletives.  The lesson: keep careful track of access and passwords to your social media account.
• Don't let staff leave before they provide all the usernames and passwords to corporate social media accounts. We've seen this happen just once before making sure we always ask in future situations.  Any marketing executive handling corporate social media accounts should make sure there are others within the company who have all the usernames and passwords in one place.  That way, in case something happens during a vacation or if the main social media person leaves, the company continues to control access to its social media assets. By the way, this can take some amount of follow-through. When a senior marketing executive recently left a client, we asked for all the social media information, including blog passwords, etc. He handed off everything -- or so we thought, except he (legitimately forgot the administrator's info for the company's LinkedIn page. We found this out while the former exec was on vacation between jobs, and was unreachable. It was possible for the company to work directly with LinkedIn to reset administrator access but it took up more of our time and more of the senior exec's boss' time than it needed to.  Lesson learned.