If you want to know the one piece of social media advice we always offer to our clients—this is it:
Turn on two-factor (or multi-factor) authentication on all of your social media accounts—especially if you rely on social media marketing for your business.
In today’s digital world it is so important to keep your accounts secure. In a world where everything is increasingly moving towards digital and online—there is increased risk of security breaches, like hacking and leaking.
These risks are often something we don't think about as we go about our daily lives in the digital age—when we're posting a photo with friends or of our dog, advertising our small business, doing our banking, shopping, sending an email...you get the point. The risks of our participation in the digital world is often something we don't think about anymore, because it's so integrated into our lives—until we realize that one of our accounts has been compromised. Whether it's your personal account or information, or your business and your way of earning a living, one thing is certain—it's an absolutely terrible feeling. While there's nothing we can do to guarantee nothing will ever happen, it is our responsibility to do everything within our power to ensure it doesn't.
Create a strong password—yes, seriously—the same old one you've always used for everything isn't going to do anything for you other than make things easy for those trying to gain access to your information. Then, once you've done that, ensure you have two-factor (or multi-factor) authentication turned on for all of your accounts—this includes all of your business social media accounts and digital accounts as well as your personal ones.
Why? This is because if someone or something is trying to compromise your account, it will give you a prompt to verify that it's you—giving you an early warning sign (and time to take action) if it’s not—and as annoying as it might be to add an extra step to logging in to your accounts, trust me, it’s worth it!
Or, in the unfortunate event that your account gets wrongfully taken down, due to a glitch or bug within a platform, it can also help you recover your account—hopefully avoiding having to start all over again.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, just take a moment to think of how many other accounts or personal information is connected to your email or related usernames, etc.? If someone or something gains access to one of your accounts, it could help them gain access to them all.
Save yourself that stomach-dropping, devastating feeling, and go secure your accounts right now! You can do so within your account settings for virtually every type of social media platform or digital account.
Be sure to share this with your fellow small business friends, or anyone else you think could benefit from hearing this.