Businesses: please know who owns your Facebook Page and Instagram account.
There are companies that have been posting on Facebook for a decade and could not tell you, with any degree of confidence, who actually controls their Page.
Instagram? That’s tied to someone’s email.
Who?
Not sure.
Who has admin access?
Long pause.
“I think Brenda set that up.”
Great. Who’s Brenda?
“She left in 2019.”
Of course she did.
As a marketing person, this makes me want to beat my head against a wall. Because everything can appear to be perfectly fine. Your posts are published. People are following you. Maybe you’re even running ads.
Until one day you need to change something, add someone, remove someone or grant access to a marketing partner.
And that’s when things get interesting.
Welcome to the Meta Access Rabbit Hole
This usually starts with what should be a very simple question:
Who has access?
Sometimes there’s a Meta Business account. Sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes there is, but no one knows who created it.
Sometimes the Facebook Page was created years ago by an employee using a personal account. The Instagram account was set up later by someone else. An outside agency was added somewhere along the way. Someone left the company but still has access. Someone else thinks they’re an admin but actually isn’t.
And occasionally, there’s one shared login that has been passed from employee to employee like a family recipe, except nobody remembers who originally created it and half the ingredients are missing.
What should take five minutes becomes an archaeological dig.
What email did we use? Who created this? Is Facebook connected to Instagram? Is there a Business Portfolio? Who owns the ad account? Why does someone named Dave still have access?
Wait. Who’s Dave?
Oh, he hasn’t worked here since 2021.
Naturally.
Everything Is Fine Until It Isn’t
The problem with Meta account chaos is that you usually don’t know you have a problem while everything is working.
There’s no flashing warning light saying:
YOUR ENTIRE SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE CURRENTLY DEPENDS ON AN EMPLOYEE WHO MAY WALK OUT NEXT TUESDAY.
But think about what these accounts actually contain.
Your Facebook Page has years of posts, reviews, followers, customer interactions and brand equity. Your Instagram account has your audience and content. Your ad account may contain years of campaign history and data.
These are business assets.
Yet businesses sometimes protect the password to the office Wi-Fi more carefully than they protect access to the social media accounts representing their brand to thousands of people.
And if the person who controls that access leaves, an old agency still owns something it shouldn’t, or nobody can determine how an account was originally established, fixing it isn’t always simple.
Meta controls Meta’s account recovery processes.
Not your marketing agency. Not your IT company. Not the person in your office who is “good with Facebook.”
And Meta is not particularly concerned with getting things fixed on your timeline.
Businesses can find themselves locked out of Pages, unable to access ad accounts or, in some cases, forced to start over with an account they’ve spent years building.
That’s a terrible time to discover nobody knows where the keys are.
Please, I’m Begging You: Check This Now
The frustrating part is that preventing most of this isn’t particularly complicated.
You don’t need to become a Meta expert. You just need some basic account housekeeping.
At minimum:
- Your business should control its Meta assets, not one employee, former employee or outside vendor.
- More than one trusted person within your organization should have appropriate admin access. One person should never be the single point of failure.
- Outside agencies and partners should receive proper access through Meta, not your passwords.
- Access should be reviewed when employees or vendors come and go. If someone leaves, removing their access should be part of the offboarding process.
And please, for the love of everything holy, stop passing around one shared Facebook password to seven different people.
I Get How We End Up Here
In fairness, most businesses didn’t intentionally create this mess.
Someone needed a Facebook Page, so someone created one. Then Instagram came along. Then Meta changed how Business Manager worked. Then Business Manager became Meta Business Suite. People changed jobs. Agencies changed. Responsibilities shifted.
Meanwhile, everyone was busy actually running the business.
I get it.
But the fact that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for how we got here doesn’t make the problem any less real.
So, if you’re reading this and thinking, I’m actually not sure who has access to our accounts, don’t panic.
But do find out.
We’ve put together a simple guide to help you audit your current Meta setup and understand what a properly organized account structure should look like.
Do it while everything is working.
Because it’s much easier to organize the house than try to figure out who has the keys after you’re locked outside.
Melissa Fritchey is Director of Marketing at Higher Information Group and has spent enough time asking “Who has access to this account?” to last a lifetime.
