Jeff Harrison explains why you shouldn't share passwords with agencies. Instead, add them as admins on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and WordPress. Use a password manager like LastPass to generate unique passwords for each account, then reset and document them offline before sharing access.
Every time, it's almost flawless that this happens. Every time I bring on a new client, I need their information, like their logins to their social media channels or websites, things like that. And so many times there's a stress that is brought about by that because they're like, oh my God, I don't know where that stuff is. I just log in automatically and I don't have that information. Well, here's what I— the reason I'm making this is because I want to bring that anxiety, that overwhelm level down a little bit and realize getting your information back on track is usually pretty simple. And it can be as easy as this. Let's say, for instance, it's your Facebook channel. And I use Facebook because, as an example, because it's probably the one that is the most difficult, but yet it's still very straightforward. So here's what I'd recommend. If you're not sure what your login information is, but you need to add someone, first of all, I would not recommend you giving anyone, even myself as a digital marketing agency, giving us your actual logins unless, unless you have no idea how to add an admin. Then I would say, hey, let us have it. Let us add us as an admin. And then as soon as I'm done, change that— you change that password so you only know about that. But let's roll this back. Let's say you've forgotten your password, but you, whenever you, you know, open up your Facebook app on your phone or your computer, it just mainly takes you in on that, but you don't know exactly what it is. Well, this is what I would do. I would go to your Facebook page and I would log out. And then I would try to log in again. And if the password doesn't auto-populate, then put something in there. And if it comes up wrong, just hit forgot password. And then go through the prompts that they give you to reset the password. Once you have that, write it down someplace, document it someplace, all right? And do it offline. Do the same thing, whether it's LinkedIn, it's Facebook, it's YouTube, it's your Gmail account, whatever that is, And then I would recommend document that, put it someplace, or better yet, and this is not a plug for any of the, I'm going to call it the 1Password type of tools, but I would recommend having a tool where you only have to remember 1 password and everything else is generated for you. I'll give you an example. We use a product called LastPass. And so what happens is I have 1 password that I have to remember that will then get me into all my accounts. Well, that takes a lot of pressure off of that. But here's the other thing for that. And this was a surprise. The other day I heard this, that the third largest economy in the world, US being one, China the second, the third is cybercrime. Let that sink in a minute. The third largest economy. So the last thing we want to do is we want to overuse some, some passwords that we remember, like, you know, our street name, our wife's name, our birthday, our pet name, password for God's sakes, or forgot my password. What this does is when you put this in there and then let's say you put your Gmail account there, it'll auto-generate something that don't even try to remember it and then save it. And then every time you go to log in, it'll say, do you want to use? And whatever that password process is, you click it. Yes. You put in your main password, which you remember. Again, I would not recommend using something like I just said. Come up with something unique and put it in there and then it will populate it. All right. So the big reason I wanted to put this out there today, because I feel like whenever we have clients, we've had, we've had many clients recently come aboard and they didn't know for sure what their passwords were. They needed to reset them and they didn't know how to do it and they felt this anxiety. Please don't have that. Just know, hey, what URL, what domain do I need to log into? So if it's your website, you know, it could be the name of your, of your website forward slash, and if it's a, um, if it's a WordPress and it's wp-admin, log in, use your email address in there, and then hit forgot password, or put a password in there that you know that probably is not going to work, or the one you last remember, and then password reset, and then go through that process of resetting. It's probably going to send you a code on your phone, and they're going to want to verify that. That's great. And then just reset it, document them, and move on. It should not be a situation where it's a lot of high stress. And then again, taking it up a notch, use those password tools that we have to remember one password, and it will generate these ones that are very, very— the whole idea is they're heavily encrypted, they are hard to remember, you and I wouldn't remember them, and that's the whole point, and they're hard to get into. And then if you need to change them, you could simply say, change my password, and it'll update it in your password program. But you only have to remember one password, and that's to get started at the very beginning. I hope this helped. The big, the big reason I want to share this today was to bring down the anxiety of, god dang it, I lost my passwords, or somebody's asking me, somebody like Jeff at SwingPoint Media is asking me for my logins and I'm not sure what they are, and it's giving me all the stress and anxiety. And the people that used to have it, I'm going back to them and they don't have it. Just calm down, take a nice deep breath and say, hey, I'm just going to go to my Facebook page. I'm going to try to log in. If it's wrong, then I'm going to say I want to reset my password. It'll prompt you through what needs to happen. Then you reset it. And then if you need to have someone like me come in as an admin, which I'd recommend putting an admin on your account, please don't give us your login information unless, like I said, the intention is to say, you set it up for me, Jeff. Once you get set up as an admin, I'll change my password again. Fantastic. That's the way to do it. Let us do that. We do it all the time. And, you know, here's the thing. And sometimes I'll get hung up with this as a client will say, okay, well, let's go through this and I'll help them. And it'll look like I'm not sure how to do this, and it's because the platforms change all the time. So I get it because it can be very overwhelming. We do it all the time. And for you who may do it, you know, once every couple of years at best, that this all looks foreign to you. Don't get overwhelmed. Just take a nice deep breath and, and let us help you. Or again, just reset your passwords, write them down. Then share those with us, and then we'll move forward with it. All right, I hope this helped. My name is Jeff Harrison, Swing Pump Media. If we ever can help you out with that, let us know. Have a great day, and, uh, yeah, we'll see you next time.
