Stay Safe and Secure Using Social Media

How Businesses Stay Safe and Secure Using Social Media

It’s not new news: Social media marketing has transitioned from being a whimsical hobby to a no-brainer, absolute must for businesses of all sizes that want to remain relevant. Whether you’re microblogging, posting, liking or updating information about your products and services, there’s one element that must be addressed: safety and security. If you think this is just an old song repackaged as a Web 2.0 mash-up, think again. When Webroot surveyed 803 IT professionals who worked at small and medium-sized companies, 80 percent replied that Facebook and related Web 2.0-based malware posed serious problems for social media marketing plans their companies. Of those same respondents, 73 percent thought web-based threats were more difficult to manage than their email cousins. Read further to find out how to take control of your social media space by educating yourself on privacy settings, data protection, hacking and human error (i.e., your lovable employees). What do your long lost childhood best friend, your college roommate, your boss and your significant other all have in common? If you are one of the hundreds of millions of people using social networks, there’s a good chance that you are linked to them through an online relationship. The information you share social media marketing podcast with your online contacts allows you to keep in touch without much effort. But who else is looking at that information? And how are they going to use it? Online social networks are websites that allow users to build connections and relationships to other Internet users. Social networks store information remotely, rather than on a user’s personal computer. Social networking can be used to keep in touch with friends, make new contacts and find people with similar interests and ideas.

Protect Shared Social Media and Corporate Accounts

Today's organizations are often forced to leverage shared access to social accounts such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn on behalf of the company or brand. Losing control of these social accounts can be costly, embarrassing and damage corporate brands. Common access control problems occur when employees share passwords with unauthorized users, are no longer authorized to access the accounts themselves, or leave the organization and take the shared username and password with them. Centrify Identity Service provides robust Active Directory, LDAP and/or cloud-based access and application management across any cloud application, real estate social media marketing including shared enterprise social media accounts. Built-in administrative views and reports give instant views of which employees have access to shared social media accounts, enabling organizations to centralize control over exactly which employees have access to specific social media accounts or other shared cloud applications. When an approved user needs to log into an enterprise social account, for example, they simply log into the Centrify Identity Service portal as themselves and click on the shared account. At no time do users have access to the shared password, and an IT administrator can even define when users are allowed to access the app, from what location, and can ask them for additional factors of authentication. When the employee leaves the organization or their role in the organization changes, administered access in Active Directory, LDAP or Centrify's cloud user service simply turns off shared account access. While significant investments are made social media marketing blogs protecting against external threats and data loss, organizations often forget about protecting themselves against unexpected or malicious internal threats — including the impact of unintended social media content. Not addressing this risk leaves organizations exposed to unauthorized internal access or malicious posts from casual, disgruntled or ex-employees who still have access to enterprise social accounts. With Centrify, organizations can easily centralize the access control and security of social media accounts through not having to directly share passwords with users.

Social Media - Secure your organisation

We live in a digital world where people are able to connect with others more easily than ever before with the use of social media and the internet. This means that they are also able to connect with brands easily, providing social media and other internet marketing tools are used in the correct manner. Social Media is considered as one of the best, low cost marketing tools available and many companies now employ individuals specifically to maintain and expand their social media marketing efforts. As social media has the opportunity for a brand message to reach such a wide and varied audience, social media marketing chicago many organisations now actively encourage all team members to partake in the corporate social media efforts. This company push of social media however, can leave the organisation open to security threats from members of staff who are not too content in their work – you can’t always please everyone right? By not monitoring posts and content placed across social media and the internet in general, the brand message can be manipulated and tainted. Negative messages regarding the organisation, its products and staff can be spread just as easily as, and often quicker than, the brand message. The same principle can apply to corporate secrets or key areas of the supply chain which offers a competitive advantage being revealed. This can be detrimental to the success of an organisation as content on the internet is often available a long period of time after it initially becomes an issue. Social media can also be an IT network security threat as allowing staff to access social media sites leaves the organisation open to malicious content, phishing schemes and account hacking. However, if organisations were to prohibit the use of social media all together, social media brand marketing a significant competitive advantage can be lost. However, organisations do have the ability to protect themselves against the risk through the IT team working in collaboration with the HR department in order to introduce an acceptable usage policy. This is a document which all team members must adhere to when using social media within the workplace and stipulates both acceptable and unacceptable actions ranging from social media sites that can be used, content that may be distributed and the use of personal social media accounts.