Social media is a key tool for enhancing your company’s reach and reputation, but it does open your company to the risk of being targeted by third-party groups. This increases the risk of damaging the relationship between you and your customers. Keeping your social media pages free from these threats will help ensure the trust of consumers and the legitimacy of your company.

One tactic used by scam users on social media is to post hyperlinks in the comment sections of posts that lead users to websites attempting to identify their personal details. If your followers click on these links, it can often lead to situations involving theft, blackmail, viruses, and privacy breaches. To minimise the risk of this happening, it is important to monitor the comments section of your posts and look out for any suspicious activity. It is best to delete comments including links that contain many strange or random characters, are accompanied by attention-grabbing or clickbait-like messages, or appear to have been shortened from a full-sized link to conceal what the URL really contains. For further prevention, you can report the account that commented.

Protecting your customers from spam such as offensive or abusive messages, advertisements, and pornographic content online should be a priority for businesses. Content like this can appear in the comments section of your posts, as well as posted onto your wall or timeline. To reduce the chances of spam, make sure that you only allow authorised users and websites that you trust to have access to post content on your wall. For example, if you download a third-party app to help with your social media data analytics, check that it is credible and already has good reviews before allowing access to your account details. If a third-party app or website does end up posting spam, you can disable their access by updating the ‘Apps and Websites’ page in the privacy and security settings of your account and remove them from the list.

Another risk of using social media for your business is social phishing, where a replica of your account is created in order to take advantage of the trust of your customers, tricking them into clicking fraudulent links and gaining their personal details. It is crucial to locate any such accounts quickly so they can be reported and deleted. Monitoring this can be done through searching your company name in social media sites to see if any alternate accounts appear. You can also set up Google Alerts which is free to use and will notify you when your company name has been mentioned online, making it easy to keep track of any potential imitation accounts.