As new social sites emerge and old ones become ghost towns, it’s becoming more complicated to ensure that your social properties don’t end up embarrassing you. Andrew Hennigan reports

In the anarchic early days of social media many early adopters created accounts on once-popular sites like Friendster, Bebo and Myspace. Then they left the company with out-of-date content but no usernames or passwords to access it. In the case of these three sites the problem has more or less resolved; all three have been rebooted so that the historic content is now lost and in June 2015 Friendster was shuttered again, perhaps for the last time.

But lessons have been learned and today social media managers are far more alert to the possibility that any one of today’s popular sites – and the more marginal like newcomer Ello - could become next year’s ghost town; an eerie online presence but no longer visited except by a few curious explorers.

Company mergers and acquisitions also demand careful attention to ensure that old social media accounts associated with abandoned brands are not accidentally left online.

Clearing away old content is a good idea but leaving brand protection accounts is also prudent. It costs nothing and guards against other people taking control of the space later. In some cases, like Instagram, used account names are no longer available even when the account is closed. On others, like Twitter and Pinterest, a previously used username is available almost immediately after an account has been deleted.  Someone could easily take over a released Twitter username and use it for something else.

This is also true for domain names. Sometimes companies buy a special domain name for a promotion and then let it expire after it ends. This is risky because there are some unscrupulous businesses that watch for these recently expired domains, register them and redirect them to their sites to take advantage of consumers who still follow the link. Recently Heinz was in the news when a customer followed a QR code on a ketchup bottle label and was taken to a porn site. The QR code linked to the web address used by the company for a now defunct competition, but Heinz allowed the domain name ‘sagsmithheinz.de’ to lapse after the competition closed.

There are two ways to avoid this particular risk.

• Maintain all temporary domains for a long time after the promotion has expired and redirect traffic to your main site. The actual registration is not expensive but someone has to be paid to manage the process.
• Use a page on your existing company domain – probably the cheapest solution - which at least ensures that you will always control it.

Apart from that there are five best practices that every social media team should consider:

1.  Have a clear policy:  Create a company policy defining who can create social media accounts, where the information should be recorded and who should be informed. This has to include some guidelines about the email addresses used to create accounts for the company and the way passwords are chosen, updated and stored.

2.  Educate employees:  Make sure everyone, especially new hires and interns, know about your company policy for creating, maintaining and documenting social media accounts.

3.  Maintain a list:  Someone should be the guardian of a master list with all of the social properties, usernames, passwords, administrators, security questions and any other information that might be needed to access accounts later. Be especially careful with accounts where a mobile phone is used for two-factor authentication. This has to be done with a number that is not going to be lost. Be careful also after mergers to make sure that the old email addresses used for registration still work.

4.  Re-evaluate channels each year:  Once a year review the list of social channels used by the company and make a keep/abandon decision for each of them. Once you decide to drop a channel you should remove the old content so that it doesn’t remain a ghost town or an embarrassment. At the same time post a minimal profile that links to an active account.

5.  Search for unauthorised activities:  Every so often perform a deep search – going way beyond he first page results -- looking for any low profile accounts in the name of your company that might have been created by someone who shouldn’t have done it.  Even if a page is not easily found it could still be used against you one day.

Few social sites last for more than ten years and even today’s most successful sites could easily become ghost towns in a few years. Careful management of social media activities will save much more work in the future, when people hired long after the creation of these accounts suddenly find that they need to access pages without knowing how.