Social media marketing is a digital marketing strategy that many businesses invest in, but many businesses are not doing enough to protect their accounts and marketing campaigns. It’s very important to understand that your social media is a valuable business asset. You’ve put in a lot of time and money into building followers, content, and your brand. Getting your marketing campaign compromised whether it’s on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook can result in a lot of damage to your business even if you’re able to get it back.
Here are some of the things you want to do to better secure your social media accounts:
Think About What Can Hurt Your Reputation
It’s important to learn about the culture of your audience if you want to make sure you don’t damage your brand on social media. For example, if you are marketing green products but use unsustainable packaging yourself, you are contradicting yourself and hurting your credibility. Visit online forums to see what your audience dislikes, hates, likes, or wants. This will give you an idea of their beliefs and values so that you can avoid potential landmines.
Manage Permissions for Employees
You should always worry about your employees posting on your accounts when they’re not supposed to. Fortunately, you can deal with this issue before it even happens. Many social media sites allow you to create sub-accounts. You can manage permissions for these sub-accounts. This means that you can prevent employees from posting, replying to posts, and deleting posts. This allows you to have tight control over your social media activity even if you are outsourcing many tasks.
Take Security More Seriously
You want to take preemptive measures to prevent hacks from happening in the first place. You need to learn to prevent a cyberthreat from happening. Educate yourself about common tricks that are used to steal access to your accounts. Learn about how email phishing attempts work, blocking automatic browser downloads, and using website blacklist add-ons will help prevent things like viruses, adware, and malware. You should also provide training to your employees. Teach them the best practices for protecting social media accounts.
Set Up Protocols and Systems for Social Media Usage
Even with account permissions, you should still set up a protocol and system to access and use your social media accounts. After all, you’ll eventually want employees to help with creating content and engaging with your followers. Make sure that employees have to ask permission and get approval for content before they can post. Enable higher account privileges for limited periods of time if you want to keep a tight leash. These kinds of protocols and systems will help you take control of your marketing and avoid costly mistakes.
Monitor Your Reputation
A big part of protecting your social media marketing is to keep track of your online reputation. If somebody posts a customer complaint, you want to be on top of it and respond to the support issue. If there are controversial discussions about your business, you want to make clarifications so that there are no misunderstandings. If fake reviews and news are posted by competitors, you want to dismiss them quickly. While this is a big undertaking, there are now many reputation management platforms that help make these tasks easier.
Watch Out for Fake Accounts
Another thing you have to be careful about is people pretending to be you on social media. People can take over your inactive accounts or create account names similar to yours. Obviously, monitoring your reputation is an important part of preventing this from happening. But you also need to close down your inactive accounts and let your followers and customers know about fake accounts so that they don’t get tricked into sending them money.
These are just some of the ways you can protect your social media marketing. Once you realize how much of an asset your social media accounts are to your business, you’ll want to start playing defense to support your marketing campaigns.
