There have been many scams in and around, and social media scams have skyrocketed by at least 150%, which is a terrible news for the people who do business on social media. The scam has spread across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, in the year of 2016. The number will continue to climb up the ladder as more and more the crooks find this platform to be a fruitful target. What should the businesses do then, in such a condition? Should they pull out of social media marketing? Of course not!
It is the ultimate truth that for most brands today, social media marketing is an important strategy, and it helps in Content marketing servicing and customer servicing. To pull off this strategy, it would mean that the market opportunity would stop immediately. Instead, what the brands can do is be careful and try to avoid the risks. Here are the detailed lists of precautions and risks that often happen in social media marketing.
The risks involved in social media marketing:
The Human Errors
There could be a lot of unknown incidents like accidental tweeting and clicking on phishing links, human error is one of the most common errors that take place. There have been examples of such errors over time, and a lot of financial losses can take place depending on this error. Things can get quickly escalated in the wrong direction because of gross human errors.
Lack of Attention on Social Media
To add on to human errors, the act of not paying attention to social media is also detrimental. Leaving the social account unmonitored can cause serious consequences to the business. It might cause the infection of your business with a malicious spyware that could again spread down to the followers too. It could be even worse if the software automatically sends malicious spyware to other followers automatically- in that case, you could even lose followers.
Malicious Apps and Attacks that Happen
The internet is filled with malicious software and it is best to stay at bay from such danger. One such attack that has been in the history of malware attacks is the spread of the Locky app. The app was directly targeted at the social networking sites through corrupt jpeg sites. When an uninformed user would click on the jpeg file, Locky would lock down on the important files and immediately send a nasty node, which would demand the user for money transfer, in exchange of the opening of the files.
Phishing Scams that are Rife
Just like malicious apps that get circulated on the internet, there are many scams that get circulated too. Phishing scams use the social media platform to spread malware. They trick people to hand over banking data, personal information, and passwords, which move on to cheat and trick people. Phishing attempts increased to about a 500% in the year of 2016. A lot of fraudulent companies on facebook, twitter, and Instagram encouraged this.
One such incident happened that people would receive a message that they have been mentioned in a comment, and when they opened the comment, the immediate action would be that the spam would be automatically downloaded. This would then spread to the user’s other friends and also handle passwords and other sensitive data.
Hence it is seen that privacy and settings of such nature are extremely important. There are many businessmen who put their reputation at stake by not installing the privacy settings. Hackers as a result very easily get control over the brands and find it easy to spread the malware. They can create havoc out of these situations, and hence it is important to be extremely careful.
Author Bio
Sunny Chawla is a Marketing Manager at AIS Technolabs. Web design and Development Company, helping global businesses to grow by Hiring Web Developers. He would love to share thoughts on Market research experts, Game Applications Development and Digital Marketing etc..
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