How To Keep Your Social Media Secure
As a business, social media is a vital part of reaching customers. Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram are great places to share new products, services and business updates. Social is also a key customer service tool, allowing you to interact with those who buy from you.
Keep Your Social Media Secure
However, social is often overlooked by businesses when it comes to security. It’s worthwhile taking extra precautions to keep your social accounts secure. The last thing you need is a hacker posting on your behalf and ruining your reputation, or stealing sensitive data from your accounts. We’ve rounded up some free security tips to help you keep your social accounts secure.
Never share passwords.
It’s difficult to keep passwords secret when multiple members of staff are accessing and managing your social media accounts. We recommend keeping the number of people who know logins down to a minimum, and if details have to be shared, storing them using a secure password manager, rather than a sticky note.
Use strong, unique passwords for each account.
Never use the name of your business as your password – it’s like you’re asking to be hacked. We know it can be a real pain to remember several passwords, but it is possible. Just take a read of our post on How To Create Strong Passwords And Remember Them All.
Change your password regularly.
If you rely on social media for your business, or you’re in charge of a client’s accounts, security needs to be taken seriously. Regularly change up passwords and make sure you change them to something entirely different than before.
Hackers have become wise to people changing passwords every quarter, and it doesn’t take a wild guess if you’ve changed your password to ‘footballlover1’ to ‘footballlover2’.
Use two-factor authentication.
Having an extra layer of security never does any harm, especially on social.
Enabling multi-factor authentication usually sends a code to another device, or to an email address, to double-check you are who you say you are. It may take an extra 30 seconds, but surely that’s better than someone taking over your accounts?
Double-check any third-party applications.
You may use other apps to schedule social media posts or grab your analytics from, but make sure they’re fully verified.
If you use other applications to schedule social media posts, or grab analytics from, make sure they’re fully verified and can be trusted. Log into your social media accounts, head to your settings and you should be able to access a list of applications with access. From here, you can revoke access to any you don’t use any more, or that aren’t familiar. You may be surprised by the results.
Get antivirus software.
Stay ahead of the hackers by making sure you keep your antivirus and security software updated. Read our blog post on why you need to install software updates.
Close accounts no longer in use.
If you’ve decided not to bother with one social media account, be sure to delete it permanently, instead of leaving it dormant for a long period of time.
Social media accounts can contain sensitive information – including bank details, addresses and staff member names – so it’s vital you and your team know how to stay secure. Meanwhile, your reputation can be destroyed within a matter of minutes if the wrong people log into your account.
For example, when Burger King was hacked, and their feed was changed to McDonalds branding, and several references to drugs and racial slurs were posted.
If you’d like more information on how to stay secure online, please get in touch with a member of our team.