Deal with Social Media

Your social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, can live on (in a sense)—if you want them to.
Your social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, can live on (in a sense)—if you want them to.

Do you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media services? (If not, nothing to see here—skip ahead to the next chapter, Deal with Other Digital Data.) You may want a loved one to post a final message on your behalf, or you may want to hand ownership of the account to someone else. You may also want to have your messages archived (online or offline).

As is the case with email (see Deal with Email), there are also some people who shudder at the very thought of their social media accounts existing at all after they’ve died, and would prefer for the accounts to be shut down and expunged from the cloud.

Regardless of how you approach social media, it’s worth reviewing what you have, how you use it, and what your options are for the future—and then to include those wishes in your digital will.

Review Your Social Media Accounts

Earlier, in Social Media, I asked you to create a list of your social media accounts (such as Facebook and Twitter) to include as part of your inventory of digital assets. Refer back to that list now.

Take a few minutes to log in to each of the accounts on your list and skim through your posts, photos, and other information. For each service on your list, make a few notes about the extent to which you use it and how important it is to preserve its data. You can then choose any of several approaches for dealing with each account, as I describe next.

Decide What to Do with Each Account

On a new page of your digital will, under the heading “Social Media,” list each of your social media accounts along with their respective usernames and passwords, and how you’d like your digital executor to handle them.

Although not every service offers every option, your choices usually include the following:

  • Final words: Your digital executor can post a final farewell, so that anyone who sees your account in the future will know what happened and why you aren’t posting anymore. If you have a specific message you’d like to include, write it down.
  • Archive (online): Some services let you memorialize the account of a deceased user in such a way that they remain online indefinitely (for example, as a place for loved ones to post memories and condolences) but limit or disallow most access.
  • Archive (offline): Most services give you the option to download all your posts so that you can store them locally and pass them on, whether or not the data also remains online.
  • Delete: A deceased user’s account can be deleted completely, making its posts inaccessible to the public in the future. (If you do this, I suggest archiving the site’s data offline first.)
  • Hand off: In some situations, you may want to pass access to your account on to a friend or loved one. For example, if you have a Twitter account you used for sharing tips or suggestions on a favorite topic, your followers might appreciate it if someone else took over to deliver similar information.

Each site has a different procedure for archiving or deleting the account of a deceased user. In most cases, your digital executor will need to provide a death certificate and several other pieces of information. You (or your digital executor) can consult the following pages for details:

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