5 Smart Ways to Keep Your Social Media Accounts Secure

You may want to have a strong online presence if you market on social media, but it carries some risks. A strong online presence unduly exposes your business to hackers and you must strive to find a way around that if you don’t want them to stifle you out of business. Characteristically, most hackers are always very smart. So, you’ve got to be smart too if you want to stay a step ahead them in your social media marketing. You must take deliberate steps to protect your business from cyber criminals who are always on the prowl.

 
Here is what expert marketers recommend to keep your social media accounts protected round the clock.

1. Be Alert to Suspicious Activity: Cyber criminals are always on the prowl, the reason you must always be on alert for suspicious activity on your accounts. Diligently monitor your accounts for suspicious activity and take quick remedial measures if you notice any unauthorized activity. Some of such measures include but not limited to quickly changing your password, strengthening it or promptly reporting the activity to the platform admins.

2. Use Strong Encryption Tools: A social app like Whatsapp boasts of end-to-end encryption but even that may not be foolproof. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn use some encryption too to keep users’ data safe and secure. If you have access to additional encryption tools, you can use them in addition to what the social media platforms provide. When it comes to matters of online security for your social media accounts, you can never be too prepared.
 
3. Regularly Change Your Passwords: This is a good idea to keep hackers real busy trying unsuccessfully to break your passwords. If you change your passwords regularly and at any time you suspect any unauthorized activity, it can help you stave off security breaches. It may appear complex and requiring a lot of efforts from time to time, but it is all worth the while to keep your accounts secured.

4. Use Only Secure Passwords: It is only social media accounts with simple passwords that can be hacked easily. The more complex the passwords are, the more difficult it is to hack the accounts. What ensure this complexity are the length of characters counts and the mixture of these characters. Therefore, you must avoid using passwords that are easy to guess such as first names, names of pets, maiden names and so on. The general rule for strong passwords is a minimum 8-12 characters length, mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters, mixed with numbers and even some special and not too common characters/symbols.

TIP: No matter how secure your password appears to be, never use the same password across every social platform. Always make your passwords unique for each social media account.

5: Adopt Two-Factor Authentication: Since hackers are becoming smarter by the day, some social media platforms are now on their own recommending and even enforcing two-factor authentication on their accounts. It simply makes the job of hackers pretty difficult. When in place, it helps to prevent unauthorized parties from accessing your social media accounts. Even when they try, the platforms promptly raise alarms to notify and warn the accounts owners. Two-factor authentication is effective at point of logging in. While in place, anytime anyone tries to log in to your account, they’ll be asked to provide a second authentication factor. This factor may be a numeric code sent to your email or phone. It is that code in addition to your usual password that can give access into your account. Such authentication simply creates a huge lot of problems for hackers no doubt.

Social Media Content Optimization Best Practices

Is your business on social media? If it is not, you are missing a lot from the benefits of social media marketing. You’ve got to optimize your content for social media if you want to remain relevant in online business. If you want to supercharge your online engagement, content is key. By taking deliberate steps to adorn your content with the right keywords, tags, titles, links and images, it can help you target the right customers, get leads and even sales. An effectively distributed and optimized content helps create a direct line to customers who are actively searching for products/services using the keywords the content is optimized with. When your content is optimized for social media, it helps to drive engagement and meaningful interactions. After all, social media optimization is all about making everything we post on our social platforms as engaging and as fruitful as possible with conversions as the end result.
These here are some of the best practices your business needs to optimize your social platforms for better results.

Streamline Your Strategy

To market successfully on social media, the strategy you adopt is vital. This strategy must be streamlined well enough to enable you establish a clear, regular and consistent posting schedule. Meaning, as far as your audience is concerned, they can be rest assured that you’ll always be there for them. This translates to reliability and dependability which somehow helps to build trust and guarantees engagement. So, if your posting schedule drives engagement satisfactorily, it is best to stick with it so as not to disappointment your audience who keeps coming back for more of your content.

Optimize Your Accounts

This is a given. Optimized social media accounts leave no one in doubt even with a very brief interaction what your business is all about. For this reason, you must be sure that all your social media accounts/profiles align with your business message, brand image goals and ethos. You can always guarantee and maintain this posture through regular and consistent content audits. When you habitually use consistent visuals, logos, tones of voice and marketing messaging in your social media accounts, your engagement is better enhanced.

Make Your Content Searchable

Unsearchable content cannot be engaging. Because search is a major feature of most social media platforms, making your content searchable helps engagement. Diligent optimization helps that process. Most prospects search on the social platforms themselves and they find products through the right keywords. Even from major search engines like Google, prospects can search for and find social pages themselves. Marketers do take advantage of that by embedding appropriate search-friendly keywords and hashtags (but with utmost caution), in their published social media content. If keywords are excessively used, you could be guilty of keywords stuffing and search engines’ algorithms can penalize your content for that.

Last Line

To compete favorably online, businesses should focus on content optimization. Content is king in online marketing. For this reason, marketers must not just post content for posting sake. Any content worth posting must be high in quality, informative and educating enough to attract engagement. Marketers must therefore ensure they consistently write content in such a way that it engages their target personas. Of course, to engage your target personas, your content has to first reach them. An optimized content serves that purpose better.