There is one piece of advice that I feel I need to share with any Omaha area business owners that may be considering hiring someone to build them a new business website and/or manage their online presence (even if you aren’t working with us). We’ve seen business owners fall victim to this time and time again. Companies who promise to “manage” your online presence for you – including your site and social media and in doing so sign up for things on your behalf. This often includes a domain name for your business, social media accounts, etc. They promise to do this for a monthly fee. Sounds great, you pay someone who does all the work for you and you get to sit back and watch your sales increase. But there are a few problems with this including one huge problem.
The first problem – how do you know these people are actually following through with setting up anything? If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, do you have the time to followup with these people to see exactly what they are accomplishing? You’d be surprised how many times we’ve seen this where a company is paying a monthly fee (sometimes a large amount of money) and yet having the people they hired actually doing very little if anything at all. You literally could be just flushing money down the toilet and not even know it.
However, the second problem is way more substantial and literally could cost you big time – including big time financially. What happens if you decide to discontinue business with said company? They have all your logins to your social media accounts, they control the domain name of your website, etc. In most cases, these companies will refuse to simply hand over the logins for these things when a business relationship ends. They do this so they can in essence hold you hostage so you continue paying them – even if they really aren’t accomplishing much. If this happens your choices are pretty limited. For the most part, you will need to register a new domain name (for example yourbusinessomaha.com as opposed to yourbusiness.com). This in itself could confuse potential clients and cost you money. To make matters worse, what about any email addresses you were using or business cards, ads, etc where the URL of your website was displayed? You’d likely need to replace all of these as well to reflect the new domain name. But that may be just the tip of the iceberg. In most cases, you should be able to recover your social media accounts but it won’t be easy. Most social media providers (like Facebook) have steps in place to do so but it is often time consuming and tedious. You have a business to run and shouldn’t need to mess with this kind of stuff.
Long story short, no matter what you do, no matter who you work with, absolutely under no circumstances allow someone else to sign up for anything on your behalf unless you know they will give you the login info (preferably immediately). Doing so could potentially be a huge mistake.
