The social media is the trending and the most liked mass communication platform of today’s world. Almost anybody and everybody linked to the internet is part of some of the social media sites. From people to companies and from institutes to governments everyone is on the social networking for either spreading awareness or promoting brand or any other purpose. But like everything, social media also has its own set of perils. Social media is also a platform for deliberate cyber crimes that could tarnish ones brand identity and set up fraud accounts for financial benefits.
But for this, one should not restrain from promoting one’s brand because that will harm the progress of the business. To avoid such predicament the firm should take steps to protect the welfare of its brand. Some such steps are discussed below.
- The firm should devise a sound social media policy
By implementing a social media policy the firm will have a clear method of operation on the social media platform that will ensure protection of brand form malicious attacks and campaigns. Social media policy is a set of rule and regulations of the firm that all the works must abide by. This can be defined as a summed up form of different notions like mission and vision of the firm, social responsibility of the firm, security and industrial protocols of the firm, brand practises and guidelines and lastly, the firm laws.
- The firm should educate its employees accordingly
The social media policy of a firm will be able to protect the brand only when the employees are knowledgeable about it. The taskforce must be made aware of the brand’s social media policy, its pros and cons and risk management schemes.
- The password should be a difficult one
The easiest way to compromise one’s social account is by protecting it by a very predictable run on the mill password. Password is the primary wall of defence for social media account and it must be made almost inexpendable, if not completely. The ways to secure a password are to make it complex by lengthening it while incorporating special characters and alphanumeric. Two factor login, where one has to pass through two gateways like password and Captcha/OTP, or centralized password managers can also be used to secure the social account.
- The firm must have a social activity monitoring system
The monitoring system will serve for both looking out for fraudulent activities and keeping track of promotion of brand and traffic inflow in the account. The monitoring system will also facilitate customer reporting and post approval systems in order to keep vigilance on brand defamation and impersonation.
- The firm must stop hashtag hijackers beforehand
Hashtags are campaigning part of a brand identity and hijackers use them to defame a brand’s name by circulating ill rumours. The firm could prevent such happenings by promoting all possible hashtags from the very start of any campaigning with a neutral yet positive vibe.
Well when all said and done, a social media contingency plan must be placed at heart’s space at all times, because it is better to prevent such happenings than to cure them. After all, a brand’s identity is its main asset.