Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

We are a small but growing team, and we now have more than one student who is interested in maintaining our social media. Up to this point, I did most of it as a mentor (yuck) and one student took care of Twitter, but we recruited heavily for the non-robot parts of the team this year.

Facebook is pretty straightforward; I just add them as Editors. I can still maintain control of the access to the account as Admin. Same with our website.

But for Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, etc., I'm struggling with how to allow students to act on the accounts without just giving them log-in information which gives them control of the account. Our Twitter account was in limbo for a while because the student with the password left, and I don't want to repeat that.

Also, can anyone share what they have written as a policy for communications from the team? I want to allow the students freedom without having to okay every single thing, so they feel ownership, but at the same time, we have worked hard to clean up our team's image and branding, and I want to keep working in that direction. I try to model real world situations, so I want them to learn to take the reins while following "company policies."

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts...
 

Allow students to post or change the page, but have a student or mentor in charge of approving these changes before they're allowed to go live.

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

The iOS and Android Twitter apps don't require additional logins every time an account password is changed, so you can just login to the account on their phones and not worry about sharing the password. Make sure the recovery email is set to an email only you have access to.

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

TweetDeck is another option for Twitter - you can assign different people different levels of access to the Twitter account without giving them a password. I use the Mac app, and I think there are apps for other platforms.

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

For YouTube, there is an option to add/remove managers of a channel. The owner (in our case, the team's email account) is able to invite other accounts to "manage" the page - post videos, moderate comments, etc. You can learn more about how to set that up here.

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

Thank you! I looked around on YouTube forever and never saw that. YouTube is taken care of. :)

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

TweetDeck came up in my research, but it's hard to know what apps actually work. I'll check it out. That would be perfect.

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

Check out hootsuite
https://hootsuite.com

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

We use Hootsuite as well. The main issue is you can only have 3 types of social media from the one account. On the positive side, it allows for cross posting which makes putting out a single announcement to several platforms easier.

For more information on social media management, I highly recommend this Mentors without Border blog post by team 2283.

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

I give a presentation of conducing social media for FRC teams every so often. Using hoot-suite to allow students to get involved, but still let mentors have control is always a major portion of the presentation. It's probably one of the best tools out there for managing social media. I've used it in my day job as well for the past year and a half, and I wouldn't use anything else.

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

So for HootSuite, would I need to have the Pro version and then pay for extra Team Members? Or is there a way for them to utilize it without being Team Members?

Re: Allowing multiple students access to social media accounts?
 

I can't answer your question about if the free version would work. However, you could try contacting them to see if, as a FIRST team, they would give it to you for free or a reduced rate.