Guest Post: Hacked--Protecting Your Social Media Accounts and Recovering Them When They're Compromised
The past few days have been full of conversation surrounding social media business account security. Following a recent influx of high-profile account hacks, my colleagues at Powerhouse Factories, Jackie Dorsey and Mike Schottelkotte, and I worked to compile best practices on keep your business’ accounts secure. The following is a preview. You can get the rest of the content on the Powerhouse Factories blog.
Brands that leverage always-on social media to engage with consumers also open themselves up to online hackers. The risk is small, but it’s important to keep a focus on brand pages’ security to ensure the message to, and with, consumers is as planned. As Burger King recently learned, social media accounts can very quickly be transformed from something on-brand and relevant to the audience, to something the brand has no control over.
Here are a few simple tips to protect a brand’s social media accounts:
- Be sure to log out of social media accounts
- When managing social media from a mobile device, keep it locked with a password
- Change passwords regularly, e.g., once a month, and have a strong password using a variety of capitals, numbers and symbols; and make sure the password is not something easy to guess or directly related to the brand
- Keep access to passwords limited to community managers and senior managers who are responsible for social media activity
- Facebook allows brand Pages to have multiple Page managers, assign levels of access to the different teams and people
- Scan computers for viruses and malware, especially if unauthorized account behaviors continue to be posted after the password is changed
- Brands often connect different applications to their social media accounts. Execute a regular audit of which applications have access to social media accounts
- Audit the people who have access to social media accounts to make sure only individuals who need access have access
You can find the rest of the post, which includes steps on how to prevent accounts from being hacked as well as steps to take if your accounts are hacked on the Powerhouse Factories blog.