Social media is a powerful tool to use, especially if you have a business or a particular message or movement you want to publicize for others to be aware and involved in. It is hard these day’s to try and ignore the importance of social media. As great as social media can be, it can also pose many issues for the individual user and company. This week I will be explaining different safety practices you can use when using social media for your business. These practices can also be applied to your personal social media account as well! Please be sure to comment below after reading and tell me how you would handle this scenario. Also be sure to checkout some of my previous blog posts as I speak a lot on privacy issues in social media there as well. Thank you for reading!
The Scenario
I will take the role as an online marketer who has just been hired by a new prospect who owns an online consulting business. The owner uses her name for her branding and is very much concerned about privacy issues in social media. She is extremely overwhelmed about the idea of using herself for photos and videos. I will be writing an email to her expressing how important it is to use social media for a business, especially one that is based online. In this email, my main goal is to distinguish safe practices for using social media so that she will feel more comfortable with the idea. Enjoy!
The Email
Good Afternoon Ms. X,
I want to express again, how enthused I am to be helping your online consulting businesses. I appreciate you taking the time in the last email to share your concerns surrounding the use of social media and the issues surrounding privacy of information. Your concerns are valid, understandable and very real. I hope the following information in this email will help relieve some of that stress around the topic.
The use of social media as a marketing channel is essential to your business, especially since it is online. To only rely on your website, emails, client reviews and word of mouth; is simply not enough. Social media will open up plenty of opportunities to help grow. Your consulting firm will be taken to a whole new level once entered into the social media realm. Creating posts will help interact with your audience, increase the potential of being found by new cliental, and will generate more traffic to your website, thus allowing your services to be in higher demand.
Successful organizations who incorporate social media into their regular marketing techniques will have a very proactive social media risk-management strategy. Risk identification is the process of identifying social media threats that could make a company vulnerable in achieving its objectives. I will save the longer explanation of this once we establish a good time to meet. I do bring this up because you did explain your reservations around social media and many of which are indeed variables that could be a threat to you and your company. I assure you, we will incorporate a social media risk-management strategy as well so that you know, your personal and business information will be safe guarded at all times and we will have the ability to handle a situation that could occur at anytime. Please know, social media allows us to pick and choose what information is made public and what information is private. While you use your name for your own business, please know we can create social media pages that is solely focused on your company’s values and services while also dictating what parts of you, you would like to highlight within the social media plan. Here are a few best practices we can implement while using social media:
- The use of strong passwords – To protect the information of your company, it is important to establish strong passwords for each social media account, and each must be different for each account with a unique sequence of letters, numbers and special characters. It should also be at least ten characters long.
- Taking extra security measures – Establishing backup emails and phone numbers to be contacted if the account is being breached or certain changes must be made. It would also be important to set up a series of security questions to help authenticate verified users of the company’s social media accounts. We can also establish two-mode authentication which allows a user login approval or other access into private information not shared in the public view. If an account is compromised, the hacker will still not be able to fully access the account without a verification pin or additional information to continue. We would be made aware of any attempts such as this if this setting is established on our accounts.
These are only some of the more heavier practices we can instill when it comes to security issues. As mentioned previously, I wanted to highlight these points first as I know how overwhelmed you are over the risk of information being breached. The following is a lighter list of best practices when using social media:
- Research your customers – It is important to understand what your clients are doing on social media. By doing this, it could bring value to how your company communicates and interacts further with them and potential prospects and could even help sharpen or add new services for your business.
- Competitor audit- It would be wise to look into what your other competitors are doing on social media when making a social media strategy.
- Brand voice – It is key to establish and maintain your brand voice all throughout your social media accounts. The company’s values and mission should emulate in the posts being created on social media in some way. Tone is key.
- Relationship building- Participate in conversations and interact with your audience. This will help strengthen relations and could make a difference in converting a follower into a true client for your company.
- Customer feedback- A part of social media for any successful business is being able to showcase the positive feedback from your clients. This will help your audience connect more and feel good about beginning negotiations to utilize your company’s services.
- Measurement – We must measure the success of posts and analyze the data constantly to find what works and what doesn’t work for your brand. When is the best time to post? What types of posts work best? These are only some of the questions we must ask ourselves.
- Content- We must be purposeful here. You mentioned using your own pictures for the company. This is when we must discuss and plan when we should use your own image in posts. When is it most appropriate? What other content can we create that doesn’t always have to do with your own image? This will be important to figure out when discussing the social media strategy.
Now, I could keep going here but I know how busy you must be and this is why you hired me to help. I want you to know these are only some of the safe practices we could instill, but there are plenty more we can look into! My goal here is to assure you that you are in good hands and your worries will be relieved once we meet and work out a solid social media strategy. Looking forward to setting up a time with you and your team to discuss further.
Sincerly,
Austin L. Davoren
The Media Relations Nomad 