A stolen password ruins all of your marketing efforts in a few hours. A message about some copyright infringement, logging in, and voila, at the end of the day your company’s account is giving away crypto to all the followers of your brand.
This happens to startups and global companies and does not involve any advanced hacking skills.
And the great thing is that most of the social media hacks are preventable. What stops hackers is not any expensive software, but a clear workflow that everyone adheres to: who has access to the account, how they log in, how the posts flow from the creation stage to the publication, and how you react to unexpected situations.
Below you will find how to implement each point into your processes to get a secure workflow for a team of three or even thirty.
Why Social Media Security Is a Team Challenge
There are several reasons why social media security is always a team problem. First, social media profiles have several unique features that make them attractive for intruders:
- they are public and visible to everyone,
- they are always managed by a team or even by several agencies,
- they are accessible from anywhere to the team members and the tools they use.
At the same time, the company’s finance system will surely have tight security measures applied. But what about the Instagram account of your brand? Surely it was created years ago by some intern via their own phone number.
Therefore, shared ownership and lack of clarity about the responsibilities are exactly what hackers seek. Generative AI has made the fake support messages sent on behalf of Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn much more credible and sophisticated. And it is quite difficult to recognize the scam due to its perfect spelling.
Start with a Straightforward Audit of Your Accounts
Before implementing any changes, conduct an audit of your social media accounts. Create a simple spreadsheet with all of the profiles your company has, including the dormant ones – for example, that Facebook regional page created for some old campaign, some YouTube channel that is not updated anymore, and your handle on that new platform.
For each account, you need to find out:
- what email address and phone number are associated with it and who controls them,
- all people, agencies, and connected applications with access, and their permission level,
- whether it has two-factor authentication, and how it works.
You might be surprised by the results, as some previous employees may still have admin access to your accounts, and some app that was connected years ago to schedule some posts might still have access to the brand accounts.
Separate the Ownership and Daily Management of the Accounts
All of the accounts should be under the ownership of the company, not of any person. In practice, this means that the account login and recovery email should belong to the company. It must be a shared alias such as social-admin@yourcompany.com.
It should never be a staff member’s personal Gmail or the private email someone happened to use when they first signed up. If that person leaves on bad terms, you don’t want account recovery to depend on their goodwill.
After this, use business tools that every platform provides you to delegate the rights to edit the accounts. For Facebook and Instagram accounts, you should use business portfolios that are provided in Meta Business Suite. For LinkedIn – page admin roles, for TikTok – Business Center, and for YouTube – adding people with specific permission levels to the channel. Thus, you can grant publishing rights to content creators while having full access yourself.
Make Sure You Are Safe While Logging In
Each account and every user accessing it must have two-factor authentication enabled. However, not all of the approaches are equally effective. The text message code is better than none but it can be intercepted during a SIM swap attack. The authenticator app is a step forward. The most secure solution is using passkeys and hardware security keys. Both of them protect against phishing because a fake login page just cannot use them.
Passkeys have gained much traction recently, so check the security settings of each account and enable the strongest option available. In some cases, you will still need to use the shared login, such as some less popular platform where you do not have the role-based access.
Create the Clear Content Approval Workflow
Not only hackers are dangerous. Sometimes, an unapproved post can bring serious consequences. Such as revealing some information about your product, being careless while replying to something during some crisis situation, or posting personal opinion to your brand’s account instead of their own.
In order to avoid all of that, create a workflow that each post will follow:
- Drafting: the creation of the posts via scheduling tool instead of doing it directly in each social media app
- Review: editing by an editor, checking of facts, tone of voice, links, tags, and correct account
- Publishing: posting only approved posts, and documenting who approved it and when
The platforms that support this workflow are Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, and others. But remember to check what is available in the plan you pay for. The great advantage of this approach is that most of the team members will not have direct access to the social media accounts anymore.
Carefully Select the Third-Party Tools and Agencies
Each tool that you connect to the account is another entry point for hackers. Therefore, before connecting some analytics, scheduling, and AI writing tools, you should ask a couple of questions:
- Does the tool connect via the official process instead of asking for a password?
- Does it support single sign-on?
- What data does it collect and where is it stored?
Especially carefully choose AI writing tools. You are tempted to copy-paste some unreleased plans or even customers’ messages to the chatbot to write a caption. Check the data policy of the tool before this, and prefer the business plan of it.
Train Your Team to Recognize Social Engineering
Most of the account takeovers happen due to the person’s actions, not because of some technical flaw. Some common tricks are:
- fake violation notices
- fake offer of a verified badge
- collaboration requests with the suspicious attachment
- messages with urgent actions needed
One rule covers all of that: never log in via a link sent to you. If you have received the notice, open the app yourself or type in the address of the website to check if everything is ok. Use real examples in the training sessions. People tend to remember much better those phishing messages they have seen than the one from some slide.
Prepare the Incident Response Plan
Even the teams with excellent workflow can get hacked. The thing that can save you from a crisis is the fast response. Write a short incident plan and save it somewhere so the team can access it without logging into the hacked accounts.
This plan must mention people you should contact first and their numbers to call after the office hours. Also, include the recovery steps and a plan of communication with the followers, leadership, and customer support.
In most cases, the recovery steps will be the same for any platform:
- sign out of all sessions,
- reset the passwords,
- change the email and phone number for recovery,
- remove unknown admins or connected apps.
Bookmark each platform’s help page for hacked accounts right now. You will easily find it during a calm Tuesday, but not during the hack.
Keep the Workflow Alive
Your secure social media workflow is never complete. New people join the team, agencies are changed, and platforms add new security features. Create a short offboarding checklist so the access of the previous employees will be revoked on their last day, not weeks later.
Also, repeat your account audit each quarter and revisit your incident plan at least once a year, preferably after testing it with the team.
Conclusion
Social media security workflow consists of a few things:
- know your accounts and who has access to them,
- keep the ownership to the company and never use personal email addresses and phones,
- use strong authentication for each account,
- establish the workflow of posts that will include the approval step,
- restrict third-party access,
- prepare for the worst-case scenario ahead of time.
This workflow does not require a lot of money, just discipline. Start this week with the audit: spend an hour and list all your social media accounts and who has access to them. You will surely find something to fix right away and thus will avoid many problems in the future.
Then choose the next step from this guide and continue implementing the workflow until everything is ready.
