Social media has become one of the most powerful channels for growing brand awareness, building customer relationships, and driving engagement. Gary Vaynerchuck has said that, “Social media is today's word of mouth. If you're not building a brand on social, you're missing the biggest opportunity in modern marketing." Marketers—especially in social media, digital marketing, brand marketing, and corporate communications—are tasked with managing a rapidly expanding web of platforms, accounts, and users. However, with this increased reliance on social media comes an alarming rise in security threats.
In our first post of this series, we explored the challenge of sharing corporate social media logins securely. Without the right solution, credential sharing can open the door to significant security risks. If you missed it, catch up to learn why social media deserves enterprise-level security just like any other business-critical tool.
What makes social media a prime target for cyberattacks?
First, social media is a vulnerable channel for threat actors who want to negatively impact a brand’s reputation or to exploit the reach of the brand. Second, there’s an inherent weakness of security in social media apps since they were built consumer first as opposed to enterprise first.
Social Media and its Vulnerability to Threat Actors
Marketing teams today are juggling an ever-increasing number of social media platforms—each with its own set of accounts, user permissions, and credentials. This complexity only grows as brands expand their digital footprint, hire more team members, and collaborate with external agencies, freelancers, and partners. Managing access for these various users can be an overwhelming task, often requiring marketers to manually add, modify, and remove permissions across multiple platforms.
Unfortunately, many of these platforms operate outside the control of your organization’s Identity Provider (IdP) like Okta or Microsoft Azure AD/EntraID, which traditionally manages access to business apps. Social media platforms fall into the category of "disconnected" apps, meaning that IT is often sidelined, and marketers—who may lack technical or security expertise—are left to manage these critical accounts manually and it is becoming untenable for many teams.
The consequences? Not only do these processes become time-consuming, but they also increase the risk of security breaches. Social media is highly visible, widely used, and unfortunately, a common target for hackers. When account security is compromised, the repercussions can be severe—ranging from negative publicity to the loss of customer trust, and in extreme cases, irreparable damage to a brand’s reputation.
"As social media platforms become more integral to business operations, they are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals. The attack surface is expanding exponentially as these platforms fall outside traditional IT security controls, making them a prime vector for breaches."
-Tom Kellermann, former member of the Cyber Investigations Advisory Board for the U.S. Secret Service
Common Security Challenges Marketers Face
- Onboarding and Offboarding Users
Setting up access for new users like employees, agency members, or freelancers is a manual, repetitive process. Every time a new user needs access, marketing teams must individually grant permissions on each platform—whether it’s Instagram, Meta Business Manager, Facebook, LinkedIn, or others. With large enterprises managing hundreds (or even thousands) of accounts, this process can become a major drag on productivity.
Similarly, offboarding users when they no longer need access is equally cumbersome. Marketers are often forced to manually revoke permissions or change account passwords to log out former employees, contractors, or agency partners. A single oversight in this process can lead to unauthorized access, exposing your brand to significant security risks.
- Insecure Credential Sharing
In many organizations, marketers share social media account credentials through insecure methods like spreadsheets, emails, or messaging apps. This not only exposes sensitive account information to unauthorized individuals but also creates a lack of transparency over who has access and what they’re doing with it. - Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Challenges
While enabling MFA is a critical security measure, it often introduces friction when it comes to shared accounts. A single individual may hold the key to one-time passcodes, creating delays when others need access. To reduce friction, teams may disable MFA altogether, further compromising security. - Lack of Transparency and Control
When multiple users—employees, contractors, agencies—are accessing the same social media accounts, it becomes difficult to track who performed which actions. This lack of visibility not only hampers accountability but also makes it challenging to audit account activity for suspicious behavior.
“Only 30% of marketers rate their organization's marketing very effective and 66% say rising complexity in the marketplace is making it difficult for marketers to deliver business value.” (Quad.com 2024)
Why Securing Social Media is Critical
As security demands on social media grow, so does the need for a robust solution to manage it. Solutions like Cerby can empower marketing and IT teams to collaborate on securing these critical channels without compromising ease of use or productivity.
Stay tuned for the final post in our series next week, where we’ll dive into effective solutions to combat these security challenges and safeguard your brand’s social presence.
Want to protect your brand’s social media channels now? Book a demo to see how Cerby can simplify secure social media access and management for your team!
