4 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Security Practices

Successful businesses and influencers utilize social media to great effect, no matter the service, but as with most accounts in a connected world, security is extremely critical and can influence your own use of social media. Listed below are some ways that you can keep yourself safe while using social media and how smart use of social media can improve the security of your business, too.

Here are four ways you can improve your social media security practices.

Be Careful with Friend and Follow Requests

Social media provides users a lot of control over who they can connect with and who can follow them. One of the best ways to keep yourself safe while using social media is to choose selectively who you allow to follow your accounts. Only connect with those who you would not mind connecting with in real-life and those you can trust.

Set Your Profiles to Private

Another great way to protect your profiles is to keep them set to “private”. This gives you the ability to share content with only people who you allow to view your profile. You basically limit access to your personal or sensitive data. Some social media even let you customize who can see what content on a user level, giving you the ability to modulate privacy in a sense.

Stay Aware of How Much You Share

Security questions like “What is your first grade teacher's name,” or “What is your first pet's name,” are common enough that hackers can find these things by just scouring your social media profiles. This is one reason why many people choose to not share personal information like this on social media, and you can hardly fault people for using an abundance of caution in this regard. If you want to prioritize privacy and security, you could probably take a page out of their book as well.

Stay Aware of Phishing Scams

Even if you take all of the necessary precautions, there is a chance that someone might try to use phishing scams to steal credentials or sensitive information from you. You might receive messages from people you haven’t heard from in years asking for information or sharing suspicious links. Be careful not to let your guard down until you can confirm the identity of the one sending you these requests.

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