How to Use Friends+Me in your Team

Are you a little like me and try and do everything yourself? I admit I am a bit of a control freak, but recently I’ve discovered the joy and freedom of delegating some of my frequent tasks to others. Doing this has allowed me to spend more time on developing other aspects of my business and freeing my mind to focus on the important stuff!

However, delegating tasks relating to social media can be tricky. I know of some businesses who share their Twitter password within their team. That’s dangerous because the security of your Twitter account is now dependant on more than just you. There have been high profile cases of businesses’ Twitter accounts being taken over by a rogue (former) employee or by a malicious hacker. You should never share your social media accounts’ user credentials, but this is a challenge as some social networks don’t make that a simple task- Twitter in particular.

This is where a social media management tool comes in very useful- and Friends+Me does help! With Friends+Me you can delegate access to all or some of your social channels and have full control over their access. If one of your team leaves, you can easily revoke their access. It puts you in control!

To manage your team, add, edit and remove team members, click on the team link in the main menu (located in your left side menu):

Here you will see a list of your team members and what role they have been assigned. You, the owner, will already be assigned the “Profile Manager” role. You can assign others this role, or you good give them the more limited “Account Manager” role. Here’s an explanation of the different roles:

• Profile Manager — Manages your entire Friends+Me profile- basically all the social accounts/channels in your Friends+Me account. They have full control over your profile including adding and removing team members, and individual settings within each social account.
• Account Manager — Manages one or more Friends+Me accounts. This allows you to assign the management of one or more social networks within Friends+Me to a team member, such as your Facebook page, Twitter account and Google+ page. The account manager can manage all settings for the accounts they have been given access to such as the ability to queue new posts, delete posts, change link shortener or preset etc. However they can’t manage the entire profile for example they can not connect new accounts or invite team members.

Here is an example of how the Team Members section looks:

You can see that I am the Profile Owner- I have access to all my social accounts. And below, my secondary account (which I was using for testing) is set as the Account Manager role. That team member has access to my Twitter account, my Facebook page and a Pinterest board.

It’s easy to remove that member from the account (by clicking the “Remove Member” button) as well as removing access to some of the social accounts by clicking the relevant “Remove Permission” button. For example, if I decided I didn’t want this team member to manage my Facebook page any more from within Friends+Me, I’d click the “Remove Permission” button to the right of my Facebook page.

Finally, I can assign other social accounts to this team member- ones that are already in my Friends+Me account:

Below this I can a list of the invitations I’ve sent out (ones that are still pending) as well as the available profiles that I have access to.

If you have been invited to be a Profile Owner by another Friends+Me user they will be listed under the “Available Profiles” section together with your profile.

Now, let’s look at inviting a new team member. Firstly, enter their email address in the “Team Members’ Email address” field just under “Invite Team Members”:

Please note, this email address needs to be this team members’ Google account email address.

Then you’ll need to select which role you want to assign to them. As mentioned above, giving them the Profile Manager role will give them access to all your social accounts. So be careful when assigning team members’ this role! If you give them the Account Manager role, you can give them access to specific accounts- ones that you can assign later.

Once you’ve chosen, click the “Invite a Team Member” button. Friends+Me will now send that team member an email, inviting them to be a team member. This is an example of the email that get’s sent:

Once the team member, clicks on the big blue “I Accept The Invitation” button, they’ll be prompted to log in to their Google account (if they haven’t already done so). They’ll then be asked to give permission for Friends+Me to access their account (just their email address and basic profile info):

Once they’re logged in, if they were assigned the “Account Manager” role, they’ll have an empty Friends+Me account with no connected profiles. They can, of course, connect to some of their own social networks, but for now they won’t have access to any of your accounts. If you gave them the “Profile Manager” role, they’ll have access to all your accounts within your profile straight away.

Now that the team member has accepted your invitation, it’s time to assign some accounts for them to manage. For this, head on down to the “Manage Your Team” page again, and scroll down to the Team Members section. You should see the new team member listed here as an Account Manager:

Now you can assign your accounts to this team member in the way explained above. Once you’ve done this, the team member can get started with some Friends+Me magic and start queuing some posts!

If you are managing another Friends+Me profile as well as your own, or in fact managing multiple Friends+Me profiles, you’ll need a way to switch between these easily. This will allow you to manage the settings effectively, add team members, add posts the queues and more. In order to switch between your profiles, head on down to the “Manage Your Team” settings page again and look at the “Available Profiles” section:

In this section, you’ll be able to see all the profiles you manage including your own. To switch to a different profile, simply click the relevant “Switch to Profile” button and that’s it. You’ll be able to see an indication as to which profile you are managing by the avatar on the top right of your screen. Make sure your Google account has a photo to make this easier!

Now start enjoying being productive in your team!