Social media is important for all businesses. If your accounts are hacked, they can be harmful to your business and its reputation. It is a must to keep your accounts and your information secure. If you take appropriate action, you can protect your social media accounts from unwelcome hackers.
8 Social Media Security Risks For Businesses
1. Loss Of Sensitive Data
Board members and executives who have deployed social media in the business should understand how businesses are addressing the risk involved in inappropriate release, leakage or theft of information in the company, viruses and malware attacks due to human error, phishing scams, and identity thefts.
In the past 10 years, there have been 300 data breaches involving the theft of at least 100,000 or more records.
2. Compliance Breach
There are risks of communicating information that violates applicable laws and regulations while using social media, like
- Infringement of trademarks and copyrights
- Data security issues
- Employment issues
- Violations of privacy rights
- Mismanagement of electronic communications
Learn more about the social media compliance for regulated industries.
3. Reputation Loss
As consumer opinions spread quickly through social media, brands need effective response plans when a crisis occurs.
Self-inflicted reputation damage may result from any of the following
- Inappropriate employee behavior
- Setting unrealistic product or customer service expectations
- Rogue tweets of inappropriate messages intended for internal or personal use or
- Inability to measure up to the openness or transparency expected by customers * and potential clients who are seeking to engage with your product.
Customers or any third party can use social media to say negative things about the brand or its product. If the brand doesn’t engage or is not paying attention, It will be hard to manage the fallout and essential information may be overlooked.
Learn how to improve reputation of brand using comment management. Hide or delete the abusive or not proper comments
4. Financial Revelation
While implementing social media business pages employees must be mindful of avoiding commenting on brand's performance that could have any impact on the stock price or violate other rules under securities laws.
5. Headhunters
Social media these days come with opportunities as well as threats, as it provides a platform for both recruiting employees and having the company’s employees recruited by competition.
Responsibilities of a headhunter include sourcing potential candidates on social media and reaching out to potential candidates via email or phone.
6. Competition Risk
If you choose to rely primarily on traditional marketing practices you may risk a loss of market share to competitors who are using the insights social media generates.
Startups and some high-tech companies are leveraging the social media and technology to reach customers despite having very few employees.
This could present a threat to larger, more established brands if they ignore the implications of social media that can be used by new entrants.
Listen to social conversations about your product, brand, or any industry topic. Look beyond your feed and engage with audience.
7. Brand Hijack
Wide use of the internet may result in risk of a fraudulent third party taking over the brand without it's consent to obtain access to customers and prospects, including personal information.
Such frauds may include the
- Unauthorized use of brand name and logos
- Product counterfeiting and other misrepresentations.
Source: Twitter
8. Poor Management Of Social Media Forums
Imagine if an organization creates a social media presence but no one participates?
Learn step by step to create social media profiles for business
What if the organization is unable to
- Sustain momentum in being responsive
- Engaging with customers
- Scale up operations once interest takes hold and traffic increases
- Remove off-topic conversations or rude, belligerent exchanges of
Listed below are the best ways to reduce such risks.
Monitor Everything
While you may focus on threats coming from outside but sometimes employees are a source of data breaches in the organization.
Having Statusbrew as your social media management platform you can have team activity log in a centralized location where the activities of all the team members under an organization are recorded.
Primary Owner, Owner, and Admins of an organization can use activity logs to check for any unusual or suspicious activity and can eliminate organizational risks that arise from social media usage at scale.
Source: Statusbrew
Limited Access And Approval Workflows
Everyone working on your social accounts does not necessarily need the access of social media posting.
It’s an important strategy to limit the number of people who can post through your accounts.
Mindfully allot the task about who needs posting ability and why.
You can use Statusbrew. It has a flexible account hierarchy and permissions structure built for all organizations —from small to medium businesses, enterprises, and agencies. It is easy to manage users and provide different levels of access to them based on their responsibilities within the organization.
Approval workflows for your posts on Statusbrew.
Source: Statusbrew
Password
To secure a social media account is essential to create a strong password; "password123" will not cut it.
Choose a strong password, use numbers, symbols and capital letters, but make sure it is not so complicated that you cannot remember it.
Do not use the same password for each account; This is a common tactic that hackers will use when trying to access your social media profiles.A good idea is to change the passwords for your accounts when any employee leaves the company.
Or you can opt for not sharing passwords at all. With Statusbrew you can give access to your social media managers or teammates without sharing passwords.
While you should limit the number of people who can access your accounts, more than one person should know the password. If only one person has access to the account and leaves the company, it will be difficult to regain account control.
Use Two-Factor Authentication
Best practice is to have two-way authentication in order to keep your account secured.
When the employee logs in from a new device, they have to enter a PIN sent to the account holder by the app via SMS or email. This protects you from stolen passwords and also ensures that anyone who holds existing accounts is present while sign in on new devices.
Specific Email Address Only For Media Management
That way, if the company's social media account is compromised, the hacker will not be able to access any other sensitive data. Or if you only use an email account for communication, remember to use online security measures, such as selecting strong passwords and changing those passwords often.
Beware Of Wireless Social Connections
Be careful when accessing communication accounts on wireless networks. Public Wi-Fi connections in restaurants, libraries, airports and other places of business do not have the security of keeping public accounts safe. Cybercriminals have easy access to passwords and other data on these types of wireless networks.
Protect Social Accounts On Mobile Devices
To make it easier to sign in, most people who do not have settings which require two-factor authentication for mobile devices. While you may not be asked for a password each time you sign in, you must have passwords to lock your phone to prevent unauthorized use of social media accounts. Face recognition and fingerprint scanning are also available to keep mobile devices safe.
Regular Audit For New Social Media Security Issues
Constantly changing social media space is sometimes a threat to security. Hackers come up with new strategies, and new scams that can emerge at any time.
So make sure you have a regular audit for your social media accounts at least once every quarter.
Company Policy To Keep Each Account Secure
Businesses should have policies in place that contain specific steps and requirements on how to protect online communication accounts.
Clear rules should state who has access to the accounts and how they can protect themselves from security threats. The policy should also provide details of who should be notified if social media accounts are compromised.
Invest In Security Products
Keep business communication accounts secure with products that monitor business channels. Once installed, software programs alert you to any issues associated with social media accounts, including malicious links and fraudulent accounts that copy your product.
In today's world, each brand needs to assess the risk of social media and determine appropriate methods to monitor and mitigate the risks.
In closing, here are some suggested questions that agencies or marketers may consider in the context of risks inherented because of social media:
Do you know how your brand is using social media?
How different or similar Is your approach to social media from that of your competition?
If your brand uses social media, has management considered the risks discussed above?
How your brand plans to respond if the risk becomes a reality?
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