Your business’ Facebook page is a valuable marketing asset. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, is used by more than a billion of people, and you have the chance to reach all of them. Not that you will, of course, but the fraction you’ll be able to get to can be more than enough to cause a significant benefit to your business.
As with any other business asset, you need to take the safety of your Facebook page seriously. A security breach can derail your marketing efforts, and it might take you a while to get things back on track. So here are four practices that will help you ensure your page’s safety.
Admin Management
Administrators are the people who have a high degree of control over your business’ Facebook page. Over time, you can accumulate quite a lot of them — different professionals you hire to do work on your page will need admin status at one point or another. And if your page has been up for a while, and through a couple of redesign cycles, the number of people will get too large to manage.
Admin status should be given only to the people who absolutely need it. Even then, you only want them to have the privileges while they need them to perform a certain task. As soon as the task is done, the admin status should be removed.
Protect Your Password, and Change It Regularly
You probably know that you shouldn’t disclose any of your passwords to people you don’t trust. Actually, you shouldn’t disclose them to people you trust either. But that’s not the only thing you should do to protect your password.
One of the mistakes you could be making with your Facebook password is using it for other social networks as well. It’s easier if you have only one password to remember, but it’s also significantly less secure because hacking one of your password-protected assets will cause a chain reaction that will affect the rest of them. And even if you’re very happy with your password-protection practices, you should still change your password regularly.
Vet Third-Party Apps
Sooner or later, you’ll want to add some third-party apps to your business’ Facebook page. To make sure the app is safe, you need to check two things: the access it needs, and the security features it uses.
Apps will usually depend on the access to your information for some of their functionalities. You need to carefully weigh the benefit of using the app against the amount of information and the scope of access you need to provide. You don’t want use apps that require a lot from you but give very little in return.
The safety features you’re looking for in an app include SSL encryption and expiring passwords at the very least. Advanced features that are welcome include segregated databases and cloud-based redundancies.
Police the Wall
You don’t have to be the source of safety issues for your page. If you have a large following with a lot of activity on your wall, you will in time start to see people trying to fish for other people’s sensitive information.
Protecting your following from scammers is as important as protecting your page from hackers. It’s as simple as that. If people can’t be safe on your wall, it will reflect badly on your business. So make sure that your wall is moderated — policed, actually — and that action is taken whenever something fishy appears.
Whenever you see someone trying to scam people on your wall, you should exercise your power to block them. Even if it turns into a game of whack-a-mole, you should keep at it. Remember that the experience people have with your page will translate into an experience they have with your business, and you’ll catch the fallout from scammers’ activity even if you didn’t cause it.
