Social Media: When do you call the professionals?

Let me tell you a scary tale…

...No, not that one. Luckily enough for you, this story does not involve creepy clowns (though I’m happy I have been the catalyst to your coulrophobia).

This is a first-hand account of what happened with a client of mine who we don’t engage with for social media management services but maybe in hindsight, we probably should have had that conversation.

This business, currently signed with us for the services trifecta (SEO, AdWords and Web Development), uses Facebook as a tool to connect with its external stakeholders - like so many organizations before it. Further, they use Facebook as a platform for their staff to liaise one-on-one with their customers through work-centric Facebook profiles, i.e. setup specifically for their work.

For the most part, the staff manage their business page pretty well. The standard good things like engaging content and timely posts with a high response rate (nice!) - which is almost all that we saw, it was disappointing that some of the staff were lacking conversions from connections to sales. This leads us to the dark-side, what we didn’t get to see behind the scenes is the troubling part.

When staff go rogue…

The day came when we were given a tip-off that a key staff member of the business had the intentions of jumping ship to a competitor. After assessing the situation, it was found that they were funnelling valuable leads to the other company via their work Facebook account. Before we could act, the all-important login details (email and password) were changed and access was restricted to the business, our client. Luckily enough, with some sleuthing from both Matter Solutions and the client, we were able to work with Facebook to retrieve the leads and deactivate the rogue-staff-member’s profile from being used again.

Though the staff member’s actions are questionable (to say the least) it raises critically important points that every organization/workplace should learn from this situation...

If you’ve got a business with a social media account, make sure you:

• Do not set up personal social media profiles for commercial use (other than page management): Doing so means that parties involved risk breaching the terms and conditions set by social media platforms and can carry legal action and heavy financial penalties.
• Know who has access: With personal profiles, it makes it too difficult for companies to have tracking and clarity of employee activities. Say for instance, an employee was conducting unethically, how would you know? What would you do? Make sure you always know who has access to your business’ Facebook accounts, and set up different publishing settings for different employees.
• Change passwords: Frequently changing the password for your social media accounts will help give you an extra level of security. If a staff member has left and once had access to your accounts, this prevents them from being able to access your account and leave any damaging posts or steal valuable information.
• Report violations to the platform: You’ve tried to put preventative measures in place, but a staff member has still gone rogue and got access to your social media account. What do you do now? If you can’t reason with the staff member, your best choice is to contact the social media platform. They will investigate any breach of security to see if the community standards have been violated.
• Make sure you watch KPIs: Conduct out of the ordinary will often show up when reviewing the numbers. A common question we hear is “Why are you managing 140 contacts but not one is converting?”.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda

Collectively, we managed to resolve the issue quickly and save the day but my point still stands - this wouldn’t have happened if the professionals got involved earlier. If you are a small/medium business owner, don’t think that social media management is a matter of posting content and responding to comments. It’s much more than that, especially if you want your employees using it for business purposes.

So what setup have you got? Does your social media shape up? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Need help? Contact us (and may the force be with you).