Practicing Safe Social Media

You may have heard that 117 million LinkedIn user credentials are up for sale on the Dark Web. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s social accounts were hacked. While social media hacking has been around forever, this type of hack is still a popular option for hackers and can, of course, be detrimental to your business.

While this most recent social media attack is aimed at individual users, companies should be worried too. Most company pages are managed through personal profiles on most social media sites.

Why should you be worried about your company’s social media accounts? As usual, hackers are looking for information, to ruin your company’s reputation, or for monetary gain.

How do you prevent a social media hack?

1. Education. Basic social media training for any employees that have access to your company’s social media accounts is vital. Education should include practicing good password implementation, being aware of and recognizing spam and phishing attempts, sharing personal information and privacy settings. Education is especially important with how many times a person checks their social media per day and do so on their personal devices that are also used to access corporate data.
2. Limits. By limiting the number of people that have access to the social media accounts, you can help protect your company. It’s not always feasible to restrict the permissions that certain people have by using social media management tools as they don’t allow for advertising or other administrative functions. However, keep your social media team small, and limit the amount of users that have full account information, and you will reduce the risk of a breach. Also, limit the number of third-party apps and management tools.
3. Passwords. Make sure those that are managing your social media accounts, are using good password practices. They should change the passwords on all social media accounts and third party tools according to company standards, avoid using the same passwords, use strong passwords, verify information associated with the account and use two-step authentication, and remove admins that no longer need access.

Implementing a social media policy in your company will help keep your business safe. Nothing is safe from hackers, and a social media hack could severely ruin your business’ reputation. Educate your employees, limit the number of people and apps that have access to your accounts, and use good password practices. This will help keep your social media safe.