4 Ways to Protect Your Brand on Social Media
One of the most important things for brands today is to make sure they are present in social media. It’s the best way to expand your business, find new clients and customers, evolve your marketing campaign, and it provides a number of amazing benefits every business owner should use. However, with the internet expanding so fast, and with the development of new technologies, it has become imperative to ensure the safety of your brand’s social media.
If you’re a business owner, social media can provide you with all the necessary tools and resources which can help you expand your business quite a lot. However, if you’re not careful with your social media accounts, your business can suffer greatly. With so many brands falling victim to brand-damaging situations on social media, you have to learn the best way to deal with this problem.
As a freelancer who works solely from home for the last 5 years, I can tell you – mastering social media presence and branding isn’t an easy task, but it’s not impossible to achieve either. You will need to put some time and effort into learning and understanding the most important things about branding in social media, but there is quite a lot to gain. I’ve made this short guide through some of the ways business owners use to protect their brands on social media. So, let’s not waste time and let’s get straight to it.
Implementing a Social Media Policy
As with any other business in the world, when it comes to running a social media campaign for your brand, you have to establish a specific set of protocols and rules which should be followed. If you’re working alone, from home, then you’re on your own when it comes to social media policy, but if you employ a number of people, you must ensure they are involved, but also make sure they are all accountable.
A social media policy basically sets up rules and regulations that dictate appropriate behavior around your brand’s social media use. In order to make your social media policy strong and effective, there are some things you should mainly focus on. Here are some of those things that can help you make money while staying true to your brand:
- Brand guidelines
- Overall company culture, mission, and vision
- Processes, security protocols, industry regulations, IP portfolio management, relevant laws (copyright and trademark laws for example)
- Roles and responsibilities for a brand’s social media
Securing Social Media Accounts
When you start researching cyber threats and hackers you learn that quite a lot of them are based on a simple psychology. If you use passwords like “password123” or something as simple as that, you need to stop reading this article, go to your social media settings and start changing all passwords into something more complex. A simple password is a problem waiting to happen, as your social accounts usually have a lot of information about your business that can be used against you.
When you’re thinking about securing your login process, consider creating complex passwords. They should be somewhere between 8 and 20 characters, including special characters and upper and lower cases. Find the best password manager in the market and don’t be afraid to invest in something like that, as it can save you quite a lot of time and money in the long run. If possible, use multi-step authentication procedures to make sure your brand’s social media are as safe as they can be.
Setting Up Hierarchy for Social Media Posting
In order to ensure your social media content reflects your brand, you need to install proper channels of approval for social posts and overall social media activity. There should be a clear hierarchy that ensures that nothing can get out before it has been properly reviewed.
Make sure your employees have specific access to your brand’s social media. Control that access and don’t give it up to people just because you think they might help you with your social media campaign. There are loads of software solutions which can help you limit and grant access to different people with ease. This will also help with your overall social media footprint, so basically – with a proper hierarchy of social media account access, your brand’s social media becomes a powerful tool right away.
Making a Contingency Plan
Even if you did everything by the book, and you’ve followed every tip there is, there is always a chance that your campaign will hit the wall. In order to find the best way out of that situation, you have to think about a social media contingency plan.
Escalating and unexpected issues can really make or break your brand and even your company, that’s why you have to devise a set of possible outcomes that are not very good. Think about everything that can go wrong, and think about all the worst case scenarios your social media campaign might run into. Try to think of the plan and try to come up with the solutions to such potential issues. Find the best way to change your brand messaging procedures, roles, responsibilities and find key points of contact for such cases. This will help you get back on the right track even if you’ve hit the wall already.
Final Thoughts
Securing your brand’s social media is essential for protecting your brand identity and for ensuring your social media campaigns do what they were designed to do. Stopping harmful behavior before it even occurs can really mean a lot for your business, especially if you’re working from home and you really have to enhance your online presence. Do your research, ask around and make sure your social media accounts are protected.
David Koller
Latest posts by David Koller (see all)
- 4 Ways to Protect Your Brand on Social Media - October 29, 2018
First of all, I would like to thank you for sharing such a nice help on the basic problems that we come across often. It’s too good information for social media user.
Nice post, i really like it. Thanks for that