Best practice for listing management emails

Each of your listings and social profiles will be owned or managed by an email address. 

You may login via social logins such as Google, Facebook or Twitter but these accounts are ultimately associated with a username and password which is associated with your email (and sometime phone number).

One of the main reasons most businesses don't manage their online presence well is bad management of the login credentials used to access and manage their listings.  If they cannot access their listings quickly and easily they are unlikely to be managed well.

In situations where login credentials are lost it is even worse. Many listings are left with wrong or outdated information due to the effort required to re-establish ownership of these listings.

Common Mistakes

Below are some of the common mistakes businesses make when managing their listings.

Not Recording Account Credentials Centrally

People tend to create accounts quickly to achieve a purpose (get listed on X) and forget to record the account credentials where others will have access to them. 

The credentials are remembered in their browser and they can login. Or they used their phone or tablet and the credentials are only stored there.

However, when that person leaves or changes computers those credentials are lost.

Using Personal Email Addresses

People may create accounts using their own email addresses if they are in a hurry or don't think about it.  

This makes it harder to know what account manages your listings and makes it very hard to recover accounts if that email address is no longer active after someone leaves.

Using Sensitive Email Addresses

The email address you use to manage your listings and social profiles may be accessed by anyone in your business or by external people acting on your behalf. These may be myPresences staff, the agency managing listings for you or a marketing person who just joined your company.

Don't use email addresses that may include sensitive company business or correspondence with customers or other third parties.

Emails such as info, help, admin, support, hello should not be used.

Best Practice

Use a Dedicated Email Address

Create an email address that is only used for managing online listings and profiles.  This can then be shared with people who need access.

A dedicated email address makes it easy to know the ownership of each of your online accounts.

We recommend something like listings, profiles or  online.

If you have more than one location in your business you can still have a single email for all or you may decide to have seperate emails for different regions or for each location.

We recommend keeping it to one email where possible as many online services allow you to login once and manage all your listings from that one login.

Use an Email on your Domain

If possible, use an email on your domain.  This helps with trust and verification on many platforms as they can see you are using an email from the same domain as your website (which they can verify from other listings and sources).

If this is not possible, you can still use a generic email provider such as Gmail or Outlook.

Change the Password Periodically

If your listings email has been used by third parties working on your behalf it is good practice to change the password periodically and update it in myPresences for current staff to access.

If you are following best practice the email will only have access to managing your listings but it is possible someone may login to your email and make changes to or remove some of your listings.

This would be extremely rare but it is a good idea to proactively limit access.