A single social media campaign—carefully calibrated to suit the needs of a select audience—can achieve great success at a fraction of a traditional campaign’s cost. This is thanks to social media’s ubiquitous reach, data-driven insights, and the talented marketers who shape it into the kind of experience modern audiences crave.
Yet, social media marketers would be remiss if they focused exclusively on attracting customers and meeting ROI targets while neglecting to safeguard customer and client privacy or their own sensitive marketing data. Here are the steps to take for a security-conscious approach to your social media marketing efforts.
Effective Password Protection & Management
It’s common for businesses to maintain a presence on multiple social media platforms. While reusing the same password to access them all is more convenient, it makes account takeovers easier if someone steals that password. Worse yet, cybercriminals can gain access to sensitive customer information or company secrets if internal databases and communication tools have equally poor password protection.
Marketers also rely on a diverse set of tools for analytics, user engagement, content creation, and other tasks. Moreover, they may be running campaigns for multiple clients, each with distinct social media accounts.
Safeguarding all these login credentials gets tricky without the help of specialized tools. We aren’t that great at memorizing dozens of unique passwords with the complexity required to resist brute-force attacks. That’s why setting up a password manager is among the first and most fundamental security steps. For marketing teams working alongside IT, adopting password managers for IT teams ensures that sensitive credentials are securely shared and managed.
The manager automates password creation, ensuring all accounts for each team member have distinct credentials. It also provides an encrypted space to store and temporarily share these passwords. Moreover, password managers use two-factor authentication that further enhances account security. Social media platforms offer this feature internally, but other apps you rely on may not.
Service Vetting
Customer management systems, analytics platforms, ad management, and social listening tools afford marketers deep insight into their customer base and let them leverage marketing budgets to the greatest effect. However, they’re only useful when given access to audience and performance data, not to mention account details in the case of social media management platforms.
While indispensable, each tool you use is also a potential concern if its developers don’t take adequate measures to uphold data privacy and security best practices. Most of these services use APIs when interacting with social media platforms, which may enable unauthorized access to data that wouldn’t be publicly available.
Social media marketers should vet service providers based on trustworthiness and commitment to cybersecurity. Ensure that all tools comply with regulations like the GDPR and keep up with industry news to stay informed of potential data breaches and other incidents and can adopt trustworthy alternatives sooner.
Phishing & Social Engineering Prevention
Social media’s popularity makes impersonating it a lucrative business. Cybercriminals send out emails that impersonate social media platforms. They hope to trick readers into exposing their account credentials or opening malicious links. The consequences are bad enough for ordinary users, but compromising a well-known brand’s socials can have a much more far-reaching impact.
Social media itself is rife with scams specifically targeting marketers. You’re likely to encounter everything from shady companies promising incredible SEO results or ad revenue to fake influencers who offer beneficial partnerships but disappear as soon as you pay.
Training on how to recognize such threats and monitoring related developments is the only way to stay safe, as separating carefully crafted scams from legitimate opportunities is becoming increasingly difficult.
Network Security
It’s possible to incorporate some cybersecurity into your social media marketing efforts and still become a victim due to poor network choices. It’s not uncommon for marketers to work remotely, which may involve accessing company assets and social media pages from vulnerable networks like local Wi-Fi.
Securing your connection with a VPN mitigates such problems. Doing so creates an encrypted tunnel through which all communication with teammates and clients, website traffic, and sensitive file transfers pass. This means no one who might be monitoring the network knows what you’re doing, nor can they intercept or tamper with any data you send or receive.
Additionally, the best VPNs can prove useful as marketing tools in their own right. For example, global brands can use them to see how users in different regions see and interact with their content.
Developing An Incident Response Plan
Incidents may still happen even if you monitor socials for suspicious activity and follow best practices. Because you don’t know when and how developing an incident response plan that covers the most damaging eventualities is a must.
The plan should outline the steps and actions to take during an active incident and its aftermath. You should also designate individuals responsible for tracking down the problem, communicating with clients and the public, etc. Developing threat scenarios and practicing everyone’s responses will ensure you’re ready to tackle and lock down the real deal before it has time to escalate.
