#030 Social Account Mistakes You May Not Be Able To Recover From

Warning: this is the REAL WORLD, true stories, fear factor episode! We've talked about social account access in multiple episodes, but we're going to stop being polite and start getting real; this is episode 30! Beth and Kelsey tell three horror stories that could have been avoided if the accounts were set up more securely. Trust us; you do NOT want to become familiar with these situations. Follow the tips from this episode to avoid making these social account mistakes that you may not be able to recover from.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

These are true stories of people and pages that have run into major social media account access disasters. Don't let this be you.

Best Practices:

Add social media access to your onboarding and offboarding of employees
Make all employees use two-factor authentication on their apps
Keep track of all of your social assets, who has access, and secure your passwords
Do an access audit on all of your social profiles before 2021!

Download Asset Management Tool

Story 1: The Hostile Takeover

A personal profile gets hacked.
That profile is the owner of a nonprofit's Facebook Page.
The hacker transfers ownership of the Facebook Page to themselves.
The hacker removes the personal profile.
Kelsey has to do a super long process of an ownership dispute to kick the hacker off the Page and transfer ownership back to the organization.
Another week goes by, Facebook accepts the dispute, but the Instagram profile is attached to the Facebook Page.
Chatterkick has to disconnect the Instagram account from the Page via the Chatterkick business manager (no one knew the password)
Another week later, the Page has been transferred to a new Business Manager, the hacker has been removed, and the nonprofit manager has regained access!

Solutions:

Set up a Facebook Business Manager for your organization
Have that Business Manager become the owner of your organization's pages and ad accounts
Add team members, agency partners, or other access at the appropriate level through the Business Manager
Do not add new team members to the Facebook page through Page and roles on the Page, always add new members to the Business Manager
Keep track of who has access to your assets

Story 2: Personal Predicaments

A personal profile got hacked, and the hacker deleted the profile and all of the photos, posts, videos. They could not set up a new Facebook account for months due to flagged activity on the past profile.
A personal profile of a person who had passed away was hacked and deleted without notice to the family. The family had no time to download the images or videos, so they lost all of their family members' memories and photos. They were unable to retrieve the profile.

Solutions:

Create a strong password
Turn on login alerts
Turn on two-factor authentication
Set up Trusted Contacts in case you're ever locked out of your Facebook account
Add a legacy contact who has the ability to memorialize your Page if you pass away

Story 3: Knock Knock, Who's There?

Facebook started cracking down on Gray Accounts in June of 2015.
Gray accounts are being deleted from Facebook Pages leaving pages without owners and without access.
Facebook gives ZERO warnings that your account is going to be deleted.
Gray Accounts are fake accounts with admin access to a page or ad account but do not have a personal profile. Another type of gray account is an inactive account used to be an admin on a page or ad account to not connect personal profiles.
- Example: Logging into Johnny User to access your local business page. If your Johnny account is a "fake" profile, there is a chance Facebook will delete your account without notice.

Solutions:

Set up a Facebook Business Manager for your organization
Have that Business Manager become the owner of your organization's pages and ad accounts
Add team members, agency partners, or other access at the appropriate level through the Business Manager
Delete the gray account or fake profile
Do not add new team members to the Facebook page through Page and roles on the Page, always add new members to the Business Manager
Share the latest best practices within the organization
Keep track of who has access to your assets

Want your question to be answered on the generation social media podcast? Tell us what it is here!

Transcript

This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

We are just going to get started today. I'm Beth Trejo and I have Kelsey Martin with me, and we're going to be talking about social media account mistakes that we want to help you prevent from making more. If you haven't already or just share with you what other businesses, local and national, have encountered, and hopefully you can prevent making those same mistakes. So, Kelsey, let's just jump in to this topic. I'm really excited to share just some learnings. We've been at this for eight years now, and we've seen our share of mistakes, horror stories, problems that sometimes don't actually have fixes to them. So let's start out by talking about one that's fairly recent and it was a local, small organization. They had issues with their Facebook account access, a personal account access. So can you share a little bit about the story and kind of what they could have done differently?

Yeah. I will just preface this story was like a marathon of terrible things that happened and it went on for three weeks. So I'm going to try to do the abbreviated version because as it unfolded, we found out like what we assumed wasn't right. And so I'm gonna like, let me just like start from the beginning. So what happened was I, I got a phone call and this nonprofit is right in the middle of doing like a major donation drive and they were using specifically social and their website to drive donations. So they were doing like an auction and a lot of promoting. So this page always posts a lot, but this is different, right. You're right in the middle of the part where you're driving donations to support your organization. And so it was kind of a, like, this was all hands on deck anyways.

So all of a sudden in the middle of this, like right in the beginning the person who was a manager of the page, a page admin, so they had full admin access on Facebook. Yeah. Their personal account got hacked. And so they had a notification that said like, someone's trying to log in from another country. Is this, is this you? Or is this not you? And so she saw it, but didn't do anything about it and waited until the next day. And it was too late. This person had gotten access to the page and kicked her off the page. So she was the only person who had personal access, which gets kind of confusing because there are business managers and business access, which we're going to talk about. But because her personal account got hacked, the person that hacked her account set up a fake business manager, and then now owned the page.

They set an ownership request through Facebook. And Facebook was like, sounds about right. You're the only one that has access. So now a whole mystery business manager now owned the page. So nobody had access except for me through our business manager and what happened. So whenever we're going through, we were like, who's who's Kevin. And why does Kevin have access? Cause that was a person who had access and made a business manager and at a nonprofit and many businesses, it's like, Oh, well he used to work here. It was kind of like everyone thought that they knew who Kevin was. And so they were like, well, he used to work here. He hasn't been here for a really long time. So I'm wondering why he has access. And the more that we dug into it, we actually like took a screenshot of the new owner and sent it out to the board of trustees.

And nobody knew who Kevin was like, nobody had heard of him. Everybody was looking through their personal Facebook pages. Cause everyone would just assume that Kevin had worked there in the past because that's just what happens. Nobody knew Kevin never heard of him. We looked him up. I was gonna message this other guy. And just assume that he worked with the organization was like, Hey, can you give us access? But as I was hearing back from like trustees, like mystery, nobody knew who Kevin was and now Kevin assumed ownership. And I could go back and see that like, Kevin is new. Kevin is now the owner. And now we were like, Oh, panic, everybody panic. So well kind of panick. So then Chatterkick got way more involved. We reached out to our Facebook reps and tried to add other people as access, but because we didn't have access as a person like Kelsey Martin didn't have access through my personal page, it was through our business manager, there was literally nothing that I could do.

So even though I had access to the page, I can only like watch the madness unfold and do absolutely nothing. And so we got to the point where this was about a week in that they said that they would allow us to do an ownership dispute. And so that's really getting into like some technical, weird legal stuff with Facebook. So they sent me a list of like eight things that I could do to dispute the new ownership. And again, we have a level of like, well, it's not my page. I'm trying to do this on behalf of somebody else. So I was submitting a dispute on behalf of somebody else on behalf of a page that was no longer theirs. So it got really complicated. Over the week I had worked with a rep and had submitted a legal document that basically said that I wasn't lying, that I had like that

I know who the ownership was. This is who the owner should be. This is where the page is. I had to answer all of these questions. And then I had to submit a copy of my identification. I had to sign something and I had to say that if I was lying, then I could be sued. And then it also had to do this on behalf of the client. So she was leaving the country. And so I had to like, while she was in the car to be unavailable for the next forever, get her to like take a picture of her driver's license, like on her lap and then like sign a napkin with a pen and take a picture of it. So I could like turn it into a digital signature. So we're doing this while she's in the car and doesn't have access again.

They have all this donation stuff going on. So nobody had access to anything. We submitted the dispute. I got an email back on Facebook saying, cool, your dispute looks good, but your Instagram account is connected to your Facebook page. So we can't do anything. And so I was then out for two days, I had to then tap other people on my team to like disconnect and then PS, nobody had access to an Instagram account. Nobody knew what the password was. So again, we're just lucky that we had access from our business manager. So we could disconnect the Instagram from the Facebook page, resubmit the dispute again, like the 10 page thing and redo a new date. And then finally, a week later, or two weeks later, I got the like, okay, you now, like now the new business manager that we set up has access to the page and Kevin is no longer on the page.

So then Kevin got a big flag and I'm sure got his account taken down, but like we finally got access and it, but it was just like three weeks later, the donation thing was over. Then at this point, by the time we finally got access to everything, so now they have to do a whole nother setup and promotion for their event. And there's just like literally no way that the organization would have been able to like do the dispute without us, because we had access to things that they didn't have access to, or at least didn't know. It was wild. That's the abbreviated version. And so I think just to kind of clarify, because a lot of people don't understand the difference between a business manager account and personal admin account. I can kind of think about it as let's pretend you are a retail store and the retail store think of that as like your business manager account, you have a place holder that is kind of the business operator of your Facebook page.

And as an individual, as Beth, I may have the keys right. To that retail store. But I can also give other people in my organization keys to that same store. Right. And that's kind of how it works. It's kind of this unit I mean, it's a, it's an application really that Facebook operates that you can just have more control, more oversight of Facebook pages and they can also have ad accounts. Right. So let's kind of talk about like the red flags of this scenario. Like it was a very dramatic story, but I feel like if you're listening to the story, you don't know where she went wrong because you have the same setup, right? Like you have access to a page, but there are things that got missed in the setup and of the millions of years of people coming in and out of the organization, there were a couple of things that were missed.

So like to me, the red flag was that they didn't have anybody like a person owned the page. And if you are just like a regular organization who doesn't have a business manager and you just set up a Facebook page, you are now the personal owner of that page. Well, that sounds like a fine idea. Businesses changed ownership all the time or if you leave. So it ends up being like a nightmare of a scenario. So one having a person own the page is terrifying. Again, like if you get hacked and that separates then ownership is nowhere. So having a person on a page is one red flag. The second red flag was that she'd been using the same password for eight years. And so that whole like personal, I know that her personal, I know that that's everybody's fear is that when you have an admin, it's like linked their personal page, Facebook does that from a best practice, from an accountability perspective so that they can see if there's fake people or not fake people.

But you have that means that you have to like take care of your personal account. You have to make sure that it's secure. You cannot put like "password" as a password. You can't put Facebook in the password. Like you need to do the same thing and take the same level of like accountability and security as you would. If you were walking around with a key to your front door, like you wouldn't just like put it in a fake rock outside the front door, everybody would know that that's there. You would like put it on your key ring and you wouldn't let it leave you and you want to give it to other people. So you need to do the same thing. And so the, one of the bigger solutions and I, like Beth said, just kinda like breezed through this was the business manager. And a lot of people are like, what, what is that?

How is that different? My business, I manage the business. So business manager is literally business.facebook.com. And the difference like Beth was saying is that it's a little bit more like a step up in security and kind of the corral of where you would put your pages and your people and all of your assets that you have. So like your pages, your Instagram accounts, your passwords, not passwords, ad accounts and your people. So business manager is really built for people that are managing like more than one ad account it's so that your business can have all of your assets and access in one spot. So you'll set up the account at business.facebook.com. And then like for us, we log into business.facebook.com and then go to our Chatterkick business manager. And within that, we have all of the pages we have access to, but we don't own the pages.

So the second reason you would want to do this as if you are someone who would request access to multiple pages, but you don't want to own the pages. So if you're freelance or you're helping out with other businesses, you would want to have a business manager. The last one that I think a lot of people fall into is like, okay, well, we only have one page and we have one ad account. So why do we need a business manager? If you have multiple people that you are going to give access to a page, you should really consider using a business manager, instead of just continuing to add them personally to the page. The reason is because you can send an invite to their business email. Like I will literally send the invite to Beth@chatterkick.com. Now she has to verify using her personal account, but now I can manage everything in one spot.

If I'm giving Beth access to like a hundred pages, I don't have to go into every single page and remove her. I can give her employee access. So she doesn't have admin access to the pages or admin access to billing or anything like that. And just set it all up to go through the business manager. It is a lifesaver on time and security because you can completely add somebody or like eject them, like on the fly on at one point, instead of like multiple points within the pages. And the pages change all of the time, like where to find page roles you and I were looking at this the other day. It was like, why is this in a different spot? Like, why can't I see certain things? So having it on the business manager side makes it so much easier from an access point. And I think to, you know, as a best practice, if you are working with a third party partner, like an agency, like Chatterkick, or maybe you're working with somebody else, don't let them just add their employees...

Like, don't you as an admin of a Facebook page, just go in and add Kelsey Martin to your Facebook page. Like they should have a business manager account because that's how you could get in problems. If again, Kelsey Martin, she has access to the page and it's her personal accounts get, gets hacked, which is exactly what happened. People can get major problems and businesses. Again, this is a business problem. Also sucks personally, if your Facebook page gets hacked, but it's also a business risk. If you don't get this stuff set up correctly, this isn't just a like, Oh, you're risking losing your Facebook password. This is you're risking someone taking over your Facebook account. Like think of what they could do. If they tarnished your name, put bad information, they could have started posting anything like anything. And they completely owned the page. Are they going to change your name?

They could have. I mean, they could have changed it to like the nonprofit name sucks, like who knows what they could have done. So I know that like it's social media. And so people are like, ah, whatever, but like, this is really your brand reputation online. And they can completely send some signals to Google that like, you don't really want to send, like, you really should just have control of those. And I kind of breezed through this earlier, but the page ownership, I think is something that people don't understand because like I set this up a thousand years ago, so I don't know who owns, like, you really need to go check out who owns the page. And this happens all the time for us, with other agencies will set up pages for organizations and then they won't transfer ownership for whatever reason or they won't give you ownership access.

I just think that that's bizarre because it's your page and you should own it, but you really need to make sure that like my suggestion is to set up a business manager and have that business manager own the page that way. Like, if I left, if Beth left, like right now with the Chatterkick Facebook page, either one of us could leave and someone else would have admin access to the page and own the page without us, like, it would be amazing if we left on great circumstances, but that's not always what happens. Like one of us could leave and then just say like, well, I own the page, like good luck buddies. But like, if you have it set up under the business manager, they could leave and you could remove them peacefully without having to do negotiations and then like move on. So business manager is amazing.

Honestly, if you manage one page and you're thinking maybe one day, you're going to add other people, I would just set one up. It's just so much easier. Yeah. And again, I don't think people understand the business risk that is associated with these things. We've seen this happen. I can't even tell you how many times we could do like a hundred stories because people don't fully understand. And, and a lot of people leave us as agencies. You know, maybe they've kind of decided to take all their social media reigns and they're good to go and they still leave us on as admins. And so when someone leaves your organization, you need to put it on the onboarding process and on the off boarding process of that employee, just as they turn in their office keys or your computer systems or their passwords put social media admin access on that checklist because it is critically important.

And in most cases, it doesn't result in that employee going rogue on your page and being all angry. I would say the biggest thing that we see is the quiet, passive aggressive employee, where they'll just ghost you and not give you admin access, right. You still know that they have contact with you. And so they're just the keys to your Facebook page are stuck in their house and you can't get them out, right. Or they can, they delete your page. But what we often see now is that, and I feel like you still have access to, I've been trying to get Beth kicked off of a lot of pages, hundreds of pages, Beth still has access, just from like early days, like before the business manager was even a thing. But now what I see businesses do is like Sherry's not answering, let's just set up a new page and then you have two pages and like, you have to go through a full... well you won't, but you should go through like a full merging scenario.

It's just like, I'm telling you right now. Like if you're listening to this and I'm like, ah, like that's a thing, but I don't need to do it. Like, you don't need it until you need it. Like we didn't, we weren't working with this client actively. They just call me because I happened to still have access cause they didn't remove me. Like this is always what happens is like I get the call five years later and it's just like, Oh, we forgot to kick you off. But now that I have you on the phone, we did a really bad thing. Please help me. And there's like, we have, it's not even that we have access. We've just done this more often, but we're still limited on what we're able to do with some of these platforms. So like we have some strings, but like they're not magic keys to things that like, I don't have access to.

I mean, it's, it's sad when people lose access. So like I would right now before you get into like 2021 planning, like go do what access cleanup, see who has access. Like we have a format or a template for this, that we'll link it. It was linked in episode 20, but we'll link it of, it's literally an Excel version. You can do a fancy like digital version, but it's an Excel version of like what pages we have, who has access to what, what all the page roles mean. And then that's where you would like keep your passwords. So which ones are passwords? Which ones are access. Yeah, because that is the big difference too, is a lot of people will access the accounts from their personal authorizations meaning. And so I have to put my personal Facebook password in and then it will grant me access to the business manager.

It's confusing. I know, but if there's one thing you could take away from this first point is get a business manager and make sure that you do that access cleanup audit before 2021. That is your goal everybody. That's listening. Let's move into our second. Right. Let's move into our second point, which kind of builds off of that. But it really has to do with your personal account and how important that is to your business because of that access point. And so when we look at the mistakes that businesses are probably making, it has to do with your personal account. Kelsey, tell us a little bit about a recent encounter that you've had with personal access. And we're going to be talking about gray accounts. So make sure that you explain what that gray account means, well, that's in the next story you jumped ahead. The gray account is last, but do stay tuned on the gray accounts scenario.

But so we were just kinda talking about like the level of personal access and it's super important to manage, but we've had this recently. And I think this is where before this episode, Beth and I were talking about Facebook jail and getting your pages into Facebook jail kind of much like the story that we just talked about, but a lot of Facebook jail scenarios, if you've heard like the myths, like it's real, but a lot of those getting your page into Facebook jail actually comes from what you're doing on your personal pages. And your personal account access. So a couple of like recent stories that we've had, we actually had like a previous employee, like their page got their personal account, got hacked and deleted from Facebook forever. So like they lost all of their images, all their videos of their kids.

And did not have Facebook for months. She literally just got back up on Facebook like recently. But she was trying to set up new accounts and it didn't work. I've also had, well, I guess I kind of want to talk about solutions to getting hacked and how much of a risk that we've already talked about it is to like, make sure that you're securing your key because you have access to pages. So it's important if you have a personal Facebook page or any social accounts to be secure, but you have that extra level of responsibility if you have access to a page. So I want to kind of talk about these. Cause I remember Beth, when remember when like trusted accounts, trusted contacts first became a thing and you were like, wait, you were like, you're going to be one of my trusted contacts that I had no idea what you were talking about and what it was.

But I'm just going to talk through some of the account security things that you need to know about and set on your personal Facebook pages. And some of these features are on other accounts that you need to do again, like before 2021, because it's too risky not to do it. So the first one is just checking your personal account security. The first thing is getting log in alerts. And I know that this is on, I think every single platform, even including your email, I know that it sounds annoying, but like turn on your log in alerts so that, you know, like whether or not it's you or your spouse or somebody that you don't want logging into your account. If there's an attempt that account in Florida and I'm clearly an Iowa, South Dakota area, like that is a red flag and you need to deal with those log in and alerts and say like, this is not me.

Those platforms will secure your account if you just do that level. So that's like the very first level, the second one, which is even more annoying, I get it, is the two factor authentication. It's like when you log in and then it sends you a code and then you have to put the code in, I get it. Like it's the most annoying thing ever, but it's really hard for people to hack any of your accounts if you have that two factor authentication on. And then the next one is trusted accounts. I have no idea how you even found out that this was a thing, but you can set idea. Remember, is it three? Yeah. I think there's a limit. You basically just assign your personal connections in case you get locked out. It's your Facebook will guys, it's your, like, these are three people and they have to have Facebook obviously because it's three Facebook accounts, but like your trusted contacts who can get a recovery code to get your page.

So had our friend put a trusted contact. They could have just said like, Hey, trusted contact. My account got hacked. I need access that Facebook would have went through and sent a code to the trusted contact. And she would have recovered her entire page, but because she didn't do that, she completely lost everything. And then the last one and I like looked into this because I had a friend who passed away and their page was up and I'm sure most people have experiences, but their page was up for like years afterwards. And I'd kind of wondered if one of the family members had gotten access to the page, like nothing was posted or anything, but it was up forever. And then all of a sudden, a couple of years ago, I think this was last year her page got deleted. It got hacked and the name was changed into a different language.

And then all of a sudden her whole page got deleted. And so her family reached out to me and was like, can you use the Facebook gods to like give us the page back? Just so we can like download the images and then they can have it back. And so I talked to Facebook and there was literally nothing that they could do. Like I could find posts that she was tagged in and send them like links so that they knew that it was a real page, but there was literally nothing that they could do to recover the page. And so the family lost like all of the images that she had posted to her page, which is just super sad. So you can memorialize an account, like if someone passes away, but I want to talk about like the security level. So you can appoint a trusted contact is what we just talked about, but you can also appoint a legacy contact.

So that is the one person who can have access to memorialize your page. If something happens to you. And again, like most people don't think about this until like it's too late until like your account gets hacked and you lose it. And then you're like, Oh, I didn't even know that that was a thing. So set up a legacy account again, when it's even kind of like deeper in the will of your, in your, like well who cares, what happens to my Facebook page? Like I agree, but it's all of your memories now. It's like all of the pictures that you posted and the pictures that your friends tag you in, like a lot of the times, you know, for us, like we grew up on Facebook. And so getting even memories now from like 10 years ago of being on the platform, like those are pictures that I completely forgot existed.

So setting up a legacy contact will allow someone at least to have access to your page and then they can go download all the images and then delete it. But you can also set your Facebook page up to delete if you pass away, which I don't know how they know. Maybe it's like inactivity, but you can turn on a setting that it's like literally is called like a permanently delete after death setting. And Facebook will permanently delete your page again. Like I have no idea how they know, but it's something like all of these things are you don't ever think about until like you're in a middle of a crisis or your page is in jail. And now you're in jail, on Facebook, Facebook, jail, not real jail. I mean maybe, but you need to do it now before something happens for sure. And let's talk about helping our parents out right now, because we both have parents that are fairly tech savvy.

And I mean, I can't tell you how many times, and this has happened to my dad specifically. And it drives me absolutely crazy where he forgets his password. So he just makes another account. Cause he doesn't really "care". It happens to so many of my friends and family, but it's extremely risky. I mean, from a social perspective, because what they can do is they can happen. Like people can hack into your old accounts, which you're not paying attention. You don't have alerts on and not only can they like put something bad about you, whatever it can be just kind of a mess in your world, but they can use social engineering to try to take money from your friends and family, try to get them to do things you don't want them to do because it's coming from your name. So it actually is a bigger problem than many people think it is.

And so just by if my dad would have set up and listened to me a little bit, and set up those trusted contacts, I probably could have helped him get access back to his Facebook page that he duplicated and now is operating Facebook, number two. But I do think that it's our responsibility as people who can help our parents to navigate this stuff, because I promise you you'll get the phone call if you don't do it right away. So if there's no other thing that you take away from this, it's please help your parents figure this out. If you helped your parents, which I recently just did, getting them an account and I get it. I'm taking like a three phase approach because we needed a break. And my mom's going to see this because I'm posting this on Facebook and now she has a Facebook account and she literally only just is connected with me.

So like I get it. So like we went through an account set up and like, I just couldn't get into this security thing, but it's on my list. Like, we'll get there, but you need to make sure that like your parents and even us, I mean, like I set up my account when I was in high school, like, like I constantly go through and check those security settings, but it's just super important. Like those trusted con if I didn't like anything, I think everybody needs to do two factor authentication and the trusted contact thing. I mean, it's just, it's easy once you find it. It's easy. I know that these platforms are like a little bit tricky to find like, is it the armor icon? Is it this icon? Like, but take, take the 10 minutes. It's going to take to go find it and set it. When you're setting up trusted contacts

though, make sure that the other person knows that this is going to happen because they will get a notification and an email that says like, Hey, you're now this trusted contact. And when you, you were working on it, I had just like set it up. And I put my sister as mine and she was like, what did you do? Like, why am I on this? So I did have to like let her know after, but I would definitely recommend telling someone ahead of time. And then what that gives them like, so that means if, if I lose my shit, like I'm calling you and you're helping me get access again. Again, like if you have access to pages that is terrifying to lose. Was like, if my account got hacked right now, like hundreds of pages and hundreds of ad accounts on there, like it's too terrifying not to pay attention to security a hundred percent agree.

Alright, let's go move on to tip number 3... The gray account. We finally get to story story, number three, what is a great account? And why should people care? Whether or not you own your own business or you're just listening and on behalf of a marketing team. Yeah. So yeah, a gray account. I don't even know how you set one of these up now, but a lot of people have set them up in the past. So a gray account is used to admin to become an admin on a Facebook page or run advertising without having a personal account. So it's either like a legit gray account that was set up on Facebook forever ago. It used to be a thing that you could set up that doesn't even have a personal page at all. So those are still around. In June, in June, 2015, Facebook started really like cracking down on those types of gray accounts that don't have any personal account associated.

And they literally just started deleting them without telling anybody. I mean, they sent like a mini press release out, but didn't tell anybody. So those types of gray accounts are really hard to find now. And I don't feel like a lot of people have them anymore, but there is another type of gray account that I guess like we're calling a gray account is if you set up a fake person page, right, it's completely fake. You may or may not have a profile picture, but I'm basically saying if you're setting up a fake page and it's called like my user or a fake user page, even if you give it a name, but it's not something that posts it's just used as an access point to other pages that is technically a gray account. It is an inactive count. And you run a major risk again, of like Facebook finding that it's a gray account or a fake account and completely deleting it.

You will have no, like notification had a time like, Hey, this seems fishy. They will just delete it. Another thing that Facebook looks for, like in those gray accounts is one, an account that nobody's posting to. Doesn't like their profile isn't complete. So they likely know that it's a gray account or to an account that has logged in from multiple devices in multiple areas. So if it's a shared account, which a lot of you listeners are using right now, and I know we've talked about access and like every single episode, but this is probably one of the major red flags that I see pages use now is everybody logs into this Johnny access profile and then gets into the page that way, instead of having your employees use their personal pages. I get the appeal, again. You're kind of skipping out on having their personal pages attached, but you're like putting way too many eggs in the risk basket to do that at all.

And so those are like two of the, probably most used types of gray accounts. That, again, we probably have a hundred stories on this too, of like people using gray accounts, but I would highly, highly suggest skipping the gray counts. Again, setting up the business manager, making sure that you have access. This is something like I discovered this weekend was that like a whole school district set up a gray account for all of the principals of all the schools, because they need to post to the pages, but they didn't want, they didn't want them to have access to the personal pages. And two a lot of them did not have first personal Facebook accounts. So they set up gray accounts for everybody. And that's what has access to all of the school's pages in the whole district, which is like, again, terrifying because you're talking about level of risk of somebody hacking their business.

What if somebody hacked like a school page and started posting announcements? That's terrifying. I hate even bringing this up, but I'm telling you, there are some people in the world with very, either too much time or distorted views, like posting really inappropriate images coming from your business account or your personal account can do a major damage on your brand, your image, and just no one wants that. Right. So, and I think that's why when we use the words like hack, people are like, well, what does that, like just some nerd get my account and then what are they going to do? Shut it down. Like, that's the real simple version of this. Like the crazy version is the most animated thing like Beth was talking about or posting personal information about you or any of their employees on your page. Or just taking it over to, to use for malice.

And the reality is, is even if you have five friends, like, let's say you were on your personal, like even if you have five friends, they have the ability to completely scale that message. Same with the page who have like 10 followers. If you're like, ah, this gets hacked. It's not a big deal. It will become newsworthy if they start posting some wild stuff on your page. So it's just to me, I know these things seem and sound like really simple. Like yeah, we get it like enough with the fear factor. But the reality is is that it would take you 10 minutes to set some of this stuff up. An hour if you were like, really like block an hour, do it diligently. Like that will save you just one story three weeks. And that was with people that knew how to do this stuff, right?

We use these tools everyday, all day. And luckily we're an awesome phone a friend, but we're not always able to come to the conclusion and get the access and do the things like we are also limited based on these platforms. Unfortunately, we do not own these tools, so we don't have the ultimate say or control, what happens at the end of it. And again, it can be really devastating to both people personally, financially, and for their business. So let's keep all of this in mind as we go into the next coming months and really get a clean social presence. So you don't make these common mistakes. Again going over those number one, make sure that you have a business manager setup and appropriate access to the right people. You don't have to old employees having access or the wrong access points on your personal page.

Right. And business manager is exclusive for Facebook, but I think, and we've talked about some of the other platforms a little bit, or just mentioned that there are some of these things on other platforms, but Facebook is still like the biggest culprit because it is a lot of where people are spending their time. So that, but you also need to make sure that the other platforms like another really confusing platform is LinkedIn because it has personal access the way that Facebook does, but they don't have a business manager in the same sense. So you need to go through all of your platforms, determine like which ones are access, personal access, and which ones are one password and get a plan for each of those. But Facebook business manager is an amazing free tool, right? That sets up a major, like bigger opportunities for more security in clean access for Facebook.

Awesome. Just a reminder. Number two was your personal accounts, two factor authentication, making sure that your settings are appropriate on your personal accounts. And number three is those gray accounts that you may or may not have in the past, get rid of them, be done with them and get a personal account to either have access to the business manager or directly on the page, but any fake account, if it's not a real person that doesn't have a real contact information and you're not actively posting get rid of it. Yeah. 2020 RIP gray counts because the longer it goes. So, alright. Well, thank you, Kelsey. This was wonderful and we will catch everybody on the next episode. See ya!

Social MediaChatterkickSeptember 15, 2020strategy, Facebook, social media best practice