Using social media is essential for growing your business. By raising brand awareness, you can attract and retain new customers – just as long as you grow your followers. However, privacy and security concerns can make you worried about using social media. Social engineering or data theft can damage both your company’s reputation and finances. Below, we explore how you can defend against this and use social media safely.
Key aspects of social media safety
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For a start, it helps to know the key aspects of social media safety for your business. Privacy settings are an important consideration: this relates to the people who follow your business – you can’t vet every person to ensure that it’s safe for them to follow you. Data protection is important too. Encrypting your social accounts can prevent data leaks from occurring if your account is hacked. And finally, there’s human error to worry about with social media too. If your employees aren’t trained correctly, they might unwittingly share confidential information or share a virus.
Managing social media security
There are ways you can manage your social media security though. For a start, you should create complex passwords for your accounts and consistently change them to avoid outside parties taking control of them. In a similar vein, you should limit access to your accounts to only a select few employees who actually need to work on it.
You can also protect your social media accounts by showing caution over external links. Message attachments from unknown sources should be deleted. Meanwhile, you should be wary about the links you click on in case it’s a phishing attempt.
Finally, when responding to customers on social media you should never reveal any sensitive data. Always check the credentials of the enquirer before taking their request or query further.
Best practice for legal implications
It’s worth understanding best practices for legal implications on social media too. For a start, you’ll need to protect your brand. You can achieve this by monitoring comments on your website, avoiding posting libellous material and responding to negative comments about your business. On top of this, if you’re marketing on social media, you’ll need to take care to adhere to advertising standards. Finally, if your business does get into trouble with social media, you should seek advice from experienced you should seek advice from experienced technology lawyers to decide how to move forward and react accordingly to your problems.
Social media can offer your business plenty of benefits, from finding new customers to building brand awareness. But you’ll need to use it safely. And by following the guide above, you should be all set to avoid problems as you grow your following.
