How to Protect Your Social Media Accounts
Why you shouldn’t put all your eggs in any one social media platform basket!
This post is for anyone who is spending countless hours to build their presence or is solely reliant on any one social media platform for marketing their brand.
The marketing arm of your brand is essential, time consuming and costly. If you work with me directly or are a subscriber, you know how much emphasis I have made to build your email list and to communicate directly with your audience. I cannot tell you how many emails I receive from other marketers emphasizing the same thing. I recently received one from a brand who lost their 25K+ account right before the holiday season. So, I am going to be a broken record and tell you again!
Yes, it’s very important to have social media presence and a well thought out plan and visual/messaging content. If you are not making connections with your audience it doesn't matter if you have 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 “followers”. It’s just a number that we are trained to believe is important and influential. This vanity metric is often manipulated by people who decide to take the lazy way out and just purchase numbers to make themselves look or feel more valuable than they truly are. The problem is, you do not OWN these people or even your account! What happens if you were to lose your entire audience because some thief hacked into your account and deleted all your hard work that took you years to build? You would be (rightly) devastated.
This happens to many people, through no fault of their own. There is virtually no way to contact someone for HELP. If someone has taken over your account, you do have an avenue for recovery. But if the content is deleted, it is gone.
I have received several emails from banking institutions with warnings of the alarming rise of scams and hacks. Make sure your accounts are as secure as you can make them. While by no means fool-proof, add an extra layers of security.
So, friends, do not be so utterly hooked on any one social media platform as your ONLY way to market your brand. Because if you have no other way to contact people, you are literally SOL.
“Never confuse social media reach with business success. Often two very different things.”
Here are some tips about protecting yourself and your social media and other online accounts.
Online hacking can happen to anyone at anytime. There is nothing that will guarantee 100% security, however, you can be proactive with these security steps.
Your mobile phone is your MOST vulnerable device! Every app you install has access to everything within your phone, unless you don't grant full access. Purge apps you no longer use and make sure they are totally deleted from your phone. You need to not only delete the app icon, but the content, too. Here is an article for reference on how to permanently delete apps.
And, another with some helpful protection tips here on how to protect your phone.
Turn on the two-step authentication on all your social media accounts and change your PW.
Turn on the two-step authentication with all your banking institutions.
Turn on the two-step authentication with your CMS provider. (Shopify, Squarespace, etc). Delete all apps within Shopify that you no longer use (and prior to doing so, contact the app developer to make sure by deleting the app there is no additional code to strip).
Create complex passwords. Do NOT save them in any file/folder on your phone or desktop! - or any other sensitive information. Go back to the old fashioned way - you know, a thing called pen a paper.
Clear the cache on your phone and your desktop browser on a frequent basis.
Install a VPN (virtual private network) on your devices. This masks your IP address wherever you browse. I use and highly recommend Express VPN.
This may seem overwhelming, and, at the end of the day, hackers (a.k.a. criminals) can still target you.
Someone asked me WHY they do this :
Hijack the IG account to phish your contacts and their emails.
Hijack the IG account and hold it hostage (ask you for ransom).
Hijack the IG account, strip all the info and resell it to another criminal (with all your followers).
Unfortunately, we all have to protect ourselves as best as we can and recognize that our privacy is fragile. waning and vulnerable.
Aside from the steps you can take to protect yourself, you seriously need to start thinking of ways to communicate with your audience and not be solely reliant on IG or any one platform for all your marketing efforts. Because, even they can be hacked and go down (remember the last time it happened)- did you panic? What would you do if it went down permanently?
So…once again.
1) Build your email list. Communicate directly with your customers.
2) Find ONE other platform outside the “meta” conglomerate. Not all platforms are created equal - it depends on your brand, your audience and where they hang out. It also depends on how organized you are with your content - no platform is worthwhile if you can't devote your time and effort to it.
I've spent a lot of the time doing research to pass along to you. Suffices to say I almost fell off my chair when I went to get more specifics about people getting hacked on IG. Look at what came up in a search :
Dear friends, stay focused on your path forward and protect yourself!
