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.
