Social Media rules within your business.
At Marketme, we visit many companies across the UK to both appraise and take over their social media marketing campaigns. When we take over or create any social media account for our clients we are obviously sharing private details to include passwords for which we set up contract agreements which protects the company with regards to ownership of the worked on account, but many companies are still not importantly protecting their social media internally.
A very recent case for a new client was regarding one of their employee accounts which was taken across to their fierce local rivals:
If you have staff within your company who have social media accounts that use your name or branding, especially ones which are managed as part of your whole marketing drive, then it is vitally important that you clear who owns that account, both noting and taking control of the email address it is registered with and if possible the password. Can you imagine if one of your popular members of staff owns a Twitter or Linkedin account that communicate with all your clients online, then decides to leave and with the they take that account… They cud be taking with them an active target audience that if they join another similar company to yours, could be simply snatching clients or future clients from under your noses!
The best thing or any company who have staff with social media accounts, you need to make sure that they either run private accounts with I day to day promoting of your company, or you issues accounts to them for which you keep log in details and ownership.
Our client who had an issue with a staff members ‘Twitter Account’, lost out to over 10,000 followers whom most were target potential clients and existing clients which was taken over to their local rival company and that ex employee soon rebranded their account with the rivals name and started updating their promotions and offers instead – Nothing legally could be done.
‘When it comes to contracts about who your employees can approach client wise once they have left you, make sure you include a section on social media activities or better still, create and own those accounts yourself.’