Ever been locked out of your department’s Facebook Page? It’s happened more than once at MTU. As a best practice, because Facebook is tied to personal accounts, it’s important to have one to three full-time permanent employees in your office as administrators, so that when a student graduates or an employee moves on, transitions can be handled smoothly. Having a core team of admins is also vital in emergencies. If the person who posts to your social accounts isn’t available and there’s a problem you need someone you can depend on to fix the issue fast. University Marketing and Communications has key leaders on both our communications and digital teams for just such social media situations.
Some people don’t want to use their personal account for a department or organization Facebook. We understand. But you can’t make up a fake account for an administrator. If and when Facebook follows up—and the platform has become more vigilant about verifying identities—they’ll take down the page if the administrator is not a real person tied to an authentic account. That’s happened at MTU, too.
In the case of all the admins being shut out or if the only admin is no longer with the University, a person listed as an editor can try to get admin privileges if there is no administrator. This will require searching around in a morass of often unhelpful Facebook Help pages to find the correct form—the platform doesn’t make it easy! Here’s a WikiHow that may be helpful. This help page on Facebook might also lead you to somewhere useful.
Bottom line: the time has long passed when a social media account can simply be handed over to a student intern. A recent survey showed that 82 percent of your digital interactions with prospective students and other people you want to be in touch with will be on social media (Cision, State of the Media 2021). Having a fail-safe backup system for account administration is essential.
We’ll talk about icons and more getting-started tips next time. In the meantime, keep the social media questions coming to the University Marketing and Communications team at social@mtu.edu. We’ll get to as many as we can as fast as we can.
For more tips, check out our social media field guide.