How to Manage Risk in Social Media Marketing and Advertising
Reading Time: 6 minutes Social media marketing plays a crucial role in building an engaging presentation of a brand on social networking sites. However, there also several risks associated with social media marketing and advertising that can impact the brand value.
Form a political natured brand attack to illicit pages and pornographic avatar; many challenges come your way while taking your marketing efforts online. The total size and evolving nature of social networks make it daunting to track and control.
If the risks are not handled promptly, it can adversely affect your reputation and traffic. So, how you are going to tackle it?
After all, with the growing hype of social media, building a presence online is no longer optional for businesses that want to grow. Managing the social media marketing risks can be a full-time job that most of the companies fail to accomplish.
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This is why we’ve created a helpful guide on how to effectively manage the social media marketing and advertising risks like a pro.
Understand the risks
Knowing the risks and its impact is the first and essential step to manage the social media marketing risks. Here are some risks associated with social media marketing and advertising.
Competitor Plagiarism
It is possible that your competitors may plagiarize your content with their name inserted and copy your techniques and strategies.
Fake Profiles
Someone may create phony business profiles and accounts to defame your brand or mislead your customers.
Security Breaches
Being an online marketing form, social media marketing can be corrupted by viruses, malware, hacks, and other cyber crimes.
Legal Non-compliance
Sometimes it becomes impossible to comply with the continually evolving legal rules and norms. Even if you try to abide by the regulations something from the past can be used against you.
Public Relations Crisis
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It takes just a few seconds for any negative issue to go viral in social media. You will not realize when your mistake can be a trending topic of dishonesty on a variety of social sites.
Tips To Manage Social Media Marketing and Advertising Risks
Be Mindful Of Your Security
As you know, hackers look for a chance to hamper the social media sites. And it is always not about just your money or company information.
Some hackers just want to wreak havoc on your site for fun. They love spamming your fans and screw your profile page.
That means, while you are publically displaying your email or keeping the same password, you might be inviting the spammers to fulfill their wish. This is why need to be extra careful to minimize a potential breach.
Understand the Law and Operate a Clean Campaign
Staying within the boundary of law is much more critical for brands to avoid any legal complication. You never know when the ad released by your brand in the past will be pulled up as evidence to some type of litigation. Such risk can be handled by understanding the law.
Monitor Social Media Channels
As mentioned earlier, unattended social accounts can be prone to hacking. So, the best practice is to keep an eye on all of your social media marketing channels. CRM or customer relationship management tools are there to help you out in keeping track of your social media issues.
However, you can assign someone to check those posts for you. Cross check your post against your content calendar and dig into the content that drifts from your content plan. Be it a simple human error or a sign of unauthorized access, testing the water is a wise step to avoid any blunder.
Also, watch out for any imposter accounts, inappropriate mentions or negative conversations regarding your brand.
Be Aware Of Brand Attacks
When a huge number of users launch a barrage of negative comments, it can damage your brand to a great extent. The attack can be in response to anything like not sourcing products from sustainable places or offensive ad etc.
Sometimes, competitive brands are responsible for such an attack. The tough part is you will not realize when a simple customer complaint will be turned into a hate campaign against your brand.
With huge audiences online, it will take no longer for shocking and provocative content to go viral. Although, you can’t stop a brand attack, being aware of the scenario before it escalates will help you have the time required to get your defenses in order.
Report Abusive Comments to the Social Platform
Nowadays, a single tweet is all it takes for a brand to social media PR crisis. This is why it essential to inform your PR and corporate affairs teams when your post starts gaining momentum. This way, they can quickly address controversial comments to calm down the storm. The monitoring and moderation services should always stay active to avoid such situation.
Also, respond to common negative sentiment and actively manage comments so that you can eliminate or report anything that seems inappropriate to the social platform. Doing this will help you keep back the tide and minimize the PR crisis threat.
Invest In Security Technology
No matter how much effort you put into social media monitoring, it is hard to keep an eye 24 hours. However, using software to keep guard of your social channels can enhance your security.
Tools like ZeroFOX automatically check and alert you of social media security risks. Such devices can inform you about any dangerous, threatening, or offensive content or scam that is targeting your brand or customer.
If there are any malicious links posted on your accounts or any fraudulent account is impersonating your brand, such tools can notify you about it. Hacking and phishing attacks can also be tackled by using social media security tools.
Implement a Social Media Usage Policy
Having a social media policy in place for the audience as well as your employees will protect you from security threats, bad PR and legal trouble.
Here are some critical points that your brand guideline must include to deal with such security threats.
- Basic guideline regarding how to present your brand on social media
- Confidentiality and social media access rules
- Which departments are responsible for which social media account
- Copyright guidelines
- How to generate a unique password and how often it should be changed
- Rules for keeping software and devices updated
- How to recognize a scam and other security threats and whom to notify
- Guidelines on how to respond to social media security concern
Conclusion
Security threats for social media marketing and advertising are continually evolving. Hackers and scammers are coming up with new tactics to harm your site.
So, schedule regular audits of your social media security measures and rely on SEO experts to see a better result.
Moreover, avoid posting anything that can sink your social media marketing effort like the Titanic.
Now that you know some practical way to manage the social media marketing and advertising risks go ahead and relish the benefit of social media marketing.
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