Social Media Profile Turnover

You spend countless hours per day creating a social media brand.  Posting content, engaging with the community, and building your network. Then one day, the person who has built the network, or you have built the network around has decided to move on to better things for their career.  As an organization, you just lost access to the network; the brand you built is now working for someone else (potentially a competitor), and the ex-employee is leaving with all those relationships.  This scenario is playing out across organizations everywhere.  Social media and natural employee turnover have just met.

The reality is, this situation has been playing out over and over again long before social media.  Your employees are your connection to the community. Once they leave, that connection generally goes with them.  This is especially true with sales people.  Of course the scale of social media makes this a scarier proposition.  Two things to consider to minimize the risk:

1. As you build your connections, promote the use of the fan page or group. These are generally company profiles and don’t leave when an employee leaves.
2. If you have the opportunity, work out a transition strategy with the exiting employee and try to retain as many as those connections possible.

Don’t let the fear of losing an employee stop you from building out your social media strategy.  You will loose more opportunity than save business connections.  It is quickly becoming part of the standard business cycle.  We should learn from it every time, and implement best practices to reduce the impact of an exiting employee.

One Response to “Social Media Profile Turnover”

1. e-BIM : Blogs.e-bim.com Blogs » Blog Archive » How to Keep Your Contacts When an Employee Leaves says:

   April 8, 2010 at 11:52 am

   [...] colleague of mine wrote a blog about how to protect your social media contacts when an employee leaves. It’s an important thing to consider; after all, everyone has their own Facebook and LinkedIn [...]