Taking a social media inventory is a comprehensive process that includes discovering all corporate social media points-of-presence (POPs), so they can be assessed, organized, managed and secured appropriately. Below, we highlight the 3 key reasons why creating and monitoring social media inventory is critical, and should be integrated into the overall corporate risk strategy and plan.

• Most businesses have far more social media POPs — and therefore face much more risk — than they realize.

When starting a social media inventory, many business are surprised — or shocked — to discover that their brand names are emblazoned across dozens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of web pages, platforms, forums, discussions boards and so on. This is often because accounts are set up spontaneously over time vs. in a strategic and structured process. It can also happen when many social media POPs are created by third parties without authorization or permission.  

LEAVE IT TO FACEBOOK...

...to randomly change the ground under your feet. Of all the things which are important to your business' web presence, the addresses people use to find you is near the top of the list. Lose your URL and you can become invisible.

However, URLs pose another problem which most businesses don't take into consideration: the fact that you can have too many URLs for the same web property. And now it seems that Facebook has decided to give your business page one more.

Big deal, you might say? Well if you're a large organization with lots of brands or locations, your problems just got multiplied...

Taming Your Enterprise Social Media Presence

Your boss has just asked you to inventory all the social media accounts used across the enterprise. On the surface, enterprise social media account management may sound simple to your boss but you know it's nothing but.... That's because social media points-of-presence (POPs) can be created by anyone at any time without any form of control or oversight by you or your team.