Facebook Meta Saas Security Marketing

How to keep your Facebook Resources safe and secure

One of the most important services your business might be using is Meta / Facebook. It is a social media, but also a Software-as-a-service to run your business’ sales, marketing, and customer service. But do you have control of who is able to access all your Meta / Facebook resources, ads, insights, and data? This article will give you full control of your Meta / Facebook Resources.

Why is this important?

Before we start, let us talk about why it is important to have good control of your Meta / Facebook resources.

Most companies are good at securing their internal resources like physical access to the office, the laptops, and their network, but most – especially smaller businesses tend to forget that access to their Meta / Facebook Page, Ads account and Business Manager is crucial for their business, their marketing and their customers and customer support.
In larger companies, solutions like Meta / Facebook often end up outside the realm of traditional IT and IT-security, not managed by SSO (Single-sign-on solutions) and outside the realms of other security or compliance functions like Risk.
At the same time, for many companies, Meta / Facebook-channels might be their most important customer acquisition channel as well as an often-used channel of communication with their customers.

In most cases, if you take a closer look at how these resources are setup in both larger and smaller companies, they will have completely lacking security measures as well no process in place to ensure that access to their Meta / Facebook resources is managed and audited in a secure and safe manner.

What are the consequences?

Given the importance of Meta / Facebook as channel – the consequences of not having good enough control of your Facebook Resources might lead to many unwanted consequences, including the risk of

Letting unwanted people to see dialog between you and your customers, leak confidential information as well as breach rules and regulations like GDPR.
Giving unnecessary access to financial data like sales figures, conversion cost and ad-spend to people who either do not need it or should not have it.
Exposing marketing insight and knowledge about what kind of ads, creatives, text, and product that you are selling and how they are performing.
Allowing former employees who have moved to another competitors keep access, insight or even worse, allow them to sabotage your Facebook resources.
Losing control of marketing agencies or people inside of the agencies who have access to your companies’ data

Or in the worst case – lose access to parts or all your Meta / Facebook resources, including your ads account.

Why is this difficult?

There are several good reasons for why it is difficult to keep your Meta / Facebook Resources secure.

The main driver is usually the lack of awareness around how important not only access to your Meta / Facebook-resources is, but also how important the data which lies in the account is. This often results in the previously mentioned lack of guidelines as well as routines for managing security and access management of these resources.
Secondly, since Meta / Facebook is a SaaS-solution, often used entirely from a marketing or operations perspective, the business side often do the procurement of the solution as well as setup the use in the company. Due to this reason, important aspects of security are unfortunately not considered, except for cases where the procurement involves Meta / Facebook Workplaces where IT or other parts of the company usually is involved.
Other important reasons are the lack of SSO or an integration with other security features which would allow a more centralized management of access.

Finally, it is the wide use of external consultants and marketing agencies / bureaus. Often, they will end up both requesting and keeping access to your Facebook resources with too wide privileges as well as keeping them even after they are finished with their job, or you have moved on to another agency / bureau or consultant. Another issue is also the lack of transparency for you as the resource owner to know whom in the agency or consulting firm who have access to your resources, and how the external partners secure access management on their side. (Which also very often is either lacking or completely missing).

How to secure your Meta / Facebook Resources

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