Lately we have met with many companies that have reached out to us after losing access to the site, social media accounts or promotion history. It is a complicated situation, easier to avoid than to resolve.
Have you lost access to your digital marketing accounts and need help?
We have experience with recovering or rebuilding websites, Facebook accounts, Google Ads, Google Maps and dozens of other marketing assets. If you need help quickly, contact us and we will recover them together.
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Who and why has access to your accounts?
Too many businesses have the infrastructure and marketing accounts “in the hands of others”. From a web domain bought in the name of someone you no longer work with to promotional accounts created by a former employee or a site for which you can no longer recover access to the administration area.
How to get to such situations? In our experience, some of the most common situations are: you didn’t know how to make accounts and you let someone else do them; you had a very good collaboration with a person, marketing agency or outsourced marketing department, but now you want to make a change and former collaborators hold ‘hostage’ marketing accounts; those who helped you until now do not deal with it and you no longer find them; or simply by error-the Facebook page ended up in someone else’s property in the wrong click.
Sure, if you ended up on this page, the accounts probably already exist. We will discuss below how you can check if they are under your control and what options you have if they are not. But before we go into details:
How could you avoid losing access to resources in which you have invested time and money?
Such situations can be prevented if you make sure you have administrator access to the main marketing infrastructure from the start. Facebook and Instagram pages, promotional accounts, web domain and email marketing account are some of the main accounts that must be owned by the company or administrator.
If you don’t have enough experience or are not willing to create the accounts yourself, you can ask someone you trust to help you create them on your behalf. As a last resort, call the marketing team – and they can help you with the creation of accounts and initial settings, under the same conditions – on behalf of the company or administrator.
Whatever option you choose, make sure as soon as the accounts have been created that you have owner or admin access-the names may vary depending on the platform. Thus, if you have access with your email address or phone number, you significantly decrease the chances of losing access to critical assets for your business.
How do I check if I have administrator access?
In the first phase, you can get in touch with the people who created your accounts. Or you can check it yourself.
Here’s a list of critical accounts where we recommend you make sure you have access:
The domain on which your site is located – you can check on Rotld.ro
Website hosting – if you pay a monthly or annual hosting Bill, chances are everything is OK. If it’s’ free’, it can be a problem. It’s on someone’s server where you probably don’t have access.
Social media pages-the first step is to check if you can post on the social media pages of your business. This ensures that you have at least minimal access. Afterwards, it’s important to check the page settings and make sure you’re an administrator. For each platform there is a dedicated guide, you will easily find it by searching online. You can click on it to see how you check for Facebook and LinkedIn.
Facebook Business Manager-Access here helps you manage all Facebook marketing assets. You can check if you are an admin on Business Manager by following the directions from Meta Help Center.
Google myBusiness Account – if you search for your business on Google, can you respond on behalf of your business to reviews on Google Maps? Subsequently, check in business.google.com in the “users” section. Please note, this platform will be moved to Google Search and Google Maps.
Google Brand Accounts (like YouTube) – you can check by going to myaccount.google.com
Any other assets and advertising accounts: depending on the account we are discussing, the verification is done differently
What do I do if I don’t have access?
The first step we recommend if you notice that some accounts do not belong to you is to get in touch with those who have helped you manage them so far. Ask them to transfer them to you or add you as an admin/owner to your accounts and check afterwards if you have received the requested access.
They can also help you with website or hosting details-if it’s a good relationship, no one will block your access to information that actually belongs to you.
If you can’t get access from them, you have a problem. Some accounts can be retrieved by contacting support from Facebook and Google, where you will most likely have to prepare documents proving who your brand/business belongs to. In addition, take into account that not all accounts can be recovered. Some (like Google Ads) you’ll need to rebuild, which means you can lose all your promotion history.
Finally, some tips & tricks: information that can help you further
In practice, it’s not enough to have admin access to your accounts alone
Even if you are an admin, there are many ways your personal account can be locked or compromised. It’s important to make sure you have at least one other trusted person with access to each account. That way, if you ever lose access, you can always easily regain it through the other admin. To reduce security risks, don’t ignore recommendations from Google, Facebook or other platforms. They encourage you to activate various security measures on your accounts precisely to prevent no-win situations. Once in place, these measures will provide better protection against cyber attacks that can compromise your personal accounts and, if you have access to them, your business accounts too.
Besides, it doesn’t hurt to be sure that your assets are legally yours
To do this you need to be careful about the contracts you sign with marketing service providers. Under European law, intellectual property belongs to the creator of the offer (whether it’s a website, a post or a promotional campaign) – not the payer. In other words, you can find yourself in the unpleasant situation that these assets actually disappear (are deleted) when the collaboration ends.
To avoid such situations, we have two recommendations: (1) Don’t work with non-contract marketing service providers unless you trust the man completely. We know it’s tempting, but it’s also very risky; (2) Before you sign the collaboration contract, make sure there is a clause indicating the transfer of intellectual property to you (the client) when the contract is paid.
