Handing the Account to Somebody Else

Three things get handed over at once

Delegating the account looks like handing over a task, and it hands over three things.

Access, which is a security question about who can lock you out.

Voice, which is how the business sounds in public.

And judgement, which is what happens when something unexpected arrives.

Most arrangements cover the first badly and the other two not at all, which is why they go wrong in the same predictable ways.

Ownership stays with you

• The page is owned by your account, not theirs.
• They receive a role, not ownership.
• You can remove it without their cooperation.
• Two people hold owner-level access.
• Recovery details point at the business.

The first is the one that produces the worst outcomes when ignored, because a page created under somebody else's personal account belongs to them in practice, whatever anybody intended.

Grant a role, never the password

The mechanical point, and every platform supports it.

Sharing a password means you cannot tell who did what, cannot remove one person's access without disrupting everybody, and cannot revoke it without changing the credential.

A role granted to their own account is removable in a click, leaves a record of who posted what, and survives their departure without any disruption.

Give the lowest role that lets them do the job, which for somebody posting is usually not the highest one available.

Review the list of people with access twice a year, which is the same discipline as anywhere else and is skipped here most often.

Agree what they may post

The voice question, and it is better as a short list than as a document.

What they can post without asking: photographs of work, updates, answers to ordinary questions.

What always comes to you first: prices, availability commitments, anything about a named customer, anything about another business, and anything responding to criticism.

That second list is short, memorable, and covers nearly everything that causes damage.

Add tone in one sentence rather than a guide: sound like somebody who does the work, not like an advertisement.

Where more than one person posts, they need the same list, since inconsistency is more noticeable than any individual post.

A worked example

A business asked a part-time employee to run the account, gave her the login, and left her to it.

She posted consistently and well for eight months.

Then a critical comment arrived while the owner was away, she replied defensively, and a short argument was visible on the page for two days.

Separately, when she left the business, the account recovery details still pointed at her personal address and it took a week to regain full control.

Neither was her fault: nobody had told her what to escalate, and nobody had set the account up properly.

The replacement arrangement took twenty minutes: a role rather than a password, recovery pointing at the business, and five lines about what comes to the owner first.

Decide the response rules together

The judgement question, and it has to be settled before it arises.

Agree what gets answered immediately, what waits, and what is never answered by them.

Complaints, anything naming an individual, and anything legal all belong to you regardless of who is posting.

Give them permission to say nothing, explicitly, since the pressure to respond quickly is what produces the replies that cause harm.

And agree how they reach you when something needs a decision, including out of hours, because a comment on a Friday evening is exactly when this matters.

A person who knows they can wait until Monday will wait. One who is unsure will answer.

Review the first month closely

Then loosen, rather than the reverse.

For the first month, read everything before or shortly after it goes out, and discuss anything you would have written differently.

That is coaching rather than supervision, and it is the fastest way to transfer a voice.

After a month, move to reading the account weekly, and after three months to monthly.

Tightening after a problem is far harder than starting close and relaxing, and it damages the relationship in a way the initial closeness does not.

External suppliers need more, not less

Since an agency or freelancer is further from the business than an employee.

They do not overhear the phone calls, do not see the jobs, and do not know which customers are sensitive.

Which means they need material supplied rather than found: photographs, the questions customers ask, what is happening this month.

Agree how that reaches them, because the common failure is an agency posting generic content because nobody sent them anything real.

And agree that they never reply to criticism, which for an outside supplier should be absolute rather than a judgement call.

Agree what happens when it ends

The part nobody discusses at the start and everybody needs eventually.

Whether the person is staff or a supplier, the arrangement will end, and the account has to survive it without a negotiation.

Access removal belongs on the same list as keys and email accounts, and it should happen on the day rather than when somebody remembers.

Ask for anything held elsewhere: unpublished photographs, a scheduling tool with queued posts, and any content calendar, since those disappear otherwise.

Check the scheduler in particular, because posts queued weeks ahead will continue publishing after somebody has left, from a tool nobody else can reach.

The counter-case

Over-controlling the arrangement defeats it.

Requiring approval for every post means the person cannot respond to anything, the account becomes slow, and the reason for delegating disappears.

Somebody trusted to represent the business on a job site can generally be trusted to post a photograph of it.

There is also a version where an owner delegates and then posts occasionally themselves without telling anybody, which produces the inconsistency they were worried about.

Set the access properly, name the five things that come to you, review closely for a month, and then let them get on with it.

Setting it up

1. Confirm the page is owned by the business.
2. Grant a role, never a password.
3. Keep two owners and business recovery details.
4. List what needs no approval.
5. List the five things that always come to you.
6. Give explicit permission to say nothing.
7. Review weekly for a month, then loosen.

Step six prevents the most common damage, since a defensive reply written under time pressure by somebody who felt obliged to answer is the failure this arrangement produces.

Reviewing who holds access generally is covered in access nobody has revoked.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.