Spredfast launches Vault to better control access to brands’ social accounts

Spredfast’s visualization of its Vault software

Typically, a number of people need access to a brand’s social media account. For general posting, that access can be handled through a social media management platform like Spredfast or Sprinklr, which communicates with the social environment via an API.

Some kinds of upkeep need direct access to the account and can’t use a social management platform. These special kinds of upkeep include changing the brand’s cover photo, deleting posts or, on a social platform like Facebook, some kinds of ad management.

There are two kinds of direct access, Spredfast VP of Product Marketing Josh Rickel told me.

One kind, he said, is called access management. It’s available for Facebook and LinkedIn, and it allows a brand to give another user’s account access to the brand account. So, a logged-in Joe Smith could have access to, say, the Coca-Cola account because his employer, an ad agency, has Coke as a client.

Platforms like Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest offer a second kind, called credential management, in which there is just one username and password for a brand’s account. If you want to give access to multiple people in your organization, or to outside agencies, you need to give them the username and password. With multiple brand accounts on various social platforms, that often leads to the primitive step of passing around a spreadsheet of usernames and passwords.

Today, Spredfast is announcing a new solution that it says uniquely makes access and credential management easier and more secure.

It’s called Spredfast Vault, and it currently supports Twitter, Facebook Page and Facebook Ad Account.

For access management, a user can employ the Spredfast social platform, whose API communicates with Facebook’s Business Manager’s API. But Vault — a browser plugin for Chrome or Firefox — also allows a brand to control, even set up a time period, for when a user’s access ends.

For instance, perhaps Joe Smith’s ad agency is working with the brand for a short-term campaign. Vault can time out his account’s access to the brand’s Facebook account after the campaign is over.

For credential management, Vault provides the same native login as a user can do directly, but without revealing the username or password. Additionally, it can also establish a time window for granting access.

Rickel said that a standard password manager will just paste the username and password into the login page, adding that there are ways to find out the password if it is hidden.

By contrast, he said, Vault directly handles the login flow for each platform so that the username/password is better hidden, users’ access can be limited by time, reasons for login can be required and there’s a complete audit trail showing everyone who has logged in. Here’s a screen shot: