What to do when you permanently forget your social media logins
One of the biggest issues we have at Sassy Digital when taking on new clients is this: "We had a lady do our social media many years ago and she's the only one who knows the password".
Not helpful for us, but most importantly really unhelpful for our clients. The number one thing you need to make sure when setting up social media profiles is giving yourself as a business admin access which means no matter who else can log in, you are the sole owner. On Instagram and Twitter this means linking the accounts to your email address - not someone else's.
So, you've lost your password (we assume that's why you're here!) Here are the three steps you can take to login, or worst case scenario set up a new account.
1. Is it retrievable?
If you've simply forgotten the password, then yes it's retrievable as long as you have access to the email address used to create the account.
2. If it's not retrievable do you have the login for the email address that the 'reset password' email will be send to?
Retrieving your password can be as simple as clicking 'forgot password' at which point it should send your password to the email address you set up the account with.
Perhaps you don't know the password because someone set up the account for you with an email address belonging to them. Depending on your relationship with the person that knows the logins, you haven't totally lost hope. It might be awkward to ask for the login/email, or even find their contact details but it's your only hope before the next point (which you'll want to try to avoid if you can).
3. Would creating a new account be detrimental?
If you've got a lot of followers then scrapping the old account and starting from new might do you more bad than good. But for some it's the only option. Social media companies are notoriously hard to get hold of to delete old pages, so you should ask all of your friends and family to report the old page in the hope that it gets removed permanently.
This is not the best option and you'll need to consider all of the consequences before you set up a new page willy nilly. We've had clients that have three Instagram accounts because they set up one, forgot the password, until they were on number 3.
4. Once you've got yourself on your feet again do us a favour...
SAVE ALL OF YOUR PASSWORDS! Save all of your passwords in one handy and secure place so that you never forget them again. Make sure you update them as you go. We use programs like OneNote or 1 Password to save ours.