Safe Ways to Give Others Access to Your Social Media Accounts

Whether you want someone to manage your business’s social media accounts, or simply give someone temporary access to fix a problem, you need to weigh your options carefully. When you give certain kinds of access to your social media accounts, you can inadvertently give them the opportunity to cause a lot of damage. They are, after all, some of the most important apps for small businesses.

Illustration: social media account access

What kind of damage, you ask? If someone has your login and password for most social media accounts, they can change your passwords so you can’t gain access to them and change your email address so you can’t regain access to them. For Facebook pages, if you give someone full admin access, they can remove you from your own page.

While there are ways to fight these kinds of issues and regain control of your accounts, it can be time consuming and frustrating. In this post, we’re going to look at the best ways to safely give others access to your social media accounts, based on what you need them to do.

If you are looking to give people access to your social media accounts in order to post updates or respond to your audience, social media management tools can be a great alternative to giving people direct access to your social media accounts. Instead of giving them a login to your accounts, you are just giving them a login to your social media management tool.

With a social media management tool, people will not be able to make any actual changes to your account. They will be able to post messages, conversate with your audience, and see your analytics data in most cases. But they will not be able to do anything that would lock you out of your account.

Many social media management tools allow you to have teams. Each team member would have specific permissions within the platform to perform certain tasks related to your page. Here are a few examples.

Buffer has business plans starting at $50 per month, which includes a total of 25 social media media connections (profiles, pages, or groups) with access for five team members. This is a great tool if you want to give people the ability to schedule posts to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or Pinterest profiles, pages, or groups.

Team members can be added as Content Managers or Content Contributors. Managers can post directly, approve contributor posts, edit posts, and reorder everything. Contributors, on the other hand, can create posts as drafts to be approved by a Manager.

HootSuite, another popular social media management tool, has a Pro account option for $8.99 per month that lets you have up to 50 social media connections (profiles, pages, or groups). This is a great tool if you want to give people the ability to schedule posts and reply to posts from others to your social network.

You can add team members to your Pro account at $15 per month, per team member, for up to 10 team members. Team members can be given specific permissions for each social network in your HootSuite account to add posts, approve posts, manage other team members, configure RSS feeds, and more.

You can also look into social media management tools like Sprout Social, AgoraPulse, Sendible, and others to find the one that supports the number of people you want to have access to your accounts, the tasks you need them to complete, and the networks they support.

Admin Options

If you don’t want to use a social media management tool, then you need to be familiar with the admin options available to you on each social network. Networks like Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram have no options for role-based access. If you want someone to manage these accounts, they must have your login information, which gives them ultimate control of your profiles and pages.

Facebook, on the other hand, offers five different types of roles.

Analyst — Someone who can view your page’s insights and see who published as the page.
Advertiser — Someone with all of the permissions of the Analyst who also has the ability to create ads for your page.
Moderator — Someone with all of the permissions of the Advertiser who also has the ability to send messages as the page, respond to and delete comments and posts to the page, and remove and ban people from the page.
Editor — Someone with all of the permissions of the Moderator who also has the ability to edit the page, add apps, and create and delete posts as the page.
Admin — Someone who has full access to the page, page roles, and other settings. This should be only you or someone you trust 100% with your business.

LinkedIn Company Pages and Google+ Pages also allow you the ability to add others with role-based permissions. The key is to make sure that only you – or someone you trust 100% with your business – has the top level role of admin, company administrator, or page owner.

If you manage groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+, the same goes. Make sure that only you – or someone you trust 100% with your business – has the top level role of admin or owner.

In Conclusion

As you can see, there are many safe ways to give people access to your social media accounts without giving them the keys to the kingdom. Be sure to research your options thoroughly and choose the one that fits best for your business needs and security.