Securing You and Your Brand on Facebook

Social networking is huge right now and will only get bigger in the future. Websites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Vine, etc. have tens or hundreds of millions of users each, if not over a billion. The reason for so many users on social networking sites is information. People want information on all their friends and pages they follow and businesses want information on the people. Facebook has an enormous amount of information because of their billion users. What is all this information about? Each user on Facebook, whether a person or a business, is promoting their "brand" to the world. "Branding" is an important part of social networking for people and increasingly important for businesses. But nothing is worse than losing the "brand" one has built. Security is very important on social network sites because there is large amounts of information scammers and hackers want access to.

Businesses wanting to promote their brand have access to tools that gather information from Facebook that will improve their product. Tools are available (both paid and free) from Google, Hootsuite, UberVu, and SocialMention that can send alerts and create detailed graphs based on keywords to get information on the audience. It's even possible to set-up a Facebook page so that it targets a specific audience and a demographic area. This allows businesses to better relate and communicate with their consumers which in return will improve their brand. There is quite a bit of work required to manage their digital footprint though. Anything posted online will be viewed by many people so posts to be true statements. Writing the wrong post can harm the company brand.

A business will also have to take care of their Facebook page in terms of security. On the surface, Facebook is a social networking site but their main business comes as an information sharing site. Not only is Facebook making money by selling information about the users for ad revenue but also criminal organizations want access to this information by scamming or hacking users. It is safe to assume that data stored on the Facebook servers is safe from hackers because encryption software is hard to break unless there is a secret backdoor for the NSA. The way around encryption is by getting access of the user accounts in the first place which bypasses any need to break encryption. As this is much easier, scamming users of their accounts is the main method of attack. The main line of defense is using a strong password and signing out of Facebook once done. Scammers use links to fake sites that will trick users into entering their log in information. They can also install malware and scripts that will gather account information and use the account to scam other users. Specific information on securing your Facebook account can be found at this link.

List of important tips from the previous link:

• Change your password regularly.
• Make sure the URL is correct and don't log into Facebook more than once.
• Log out of Facebook if not using a personal computer.
• Keep your browser and anti-virus software up-to-date.
• Don't paste script code into the address bar.
• Don't click on weird links.
• Beware of links from friends.