Despite privacy concerns, social media is the future
Below is a mock email that I would send to a businesswoman who is looking to expand her online consulting company to social media. I discuss the best social media practices with consideration of protecting one’s social media privacy.
Dear businesswoman,
I’m so glad that you wanted to connect with me and work together on expanding your business. I believe your business displays many of the qualities that consumers will be looking for when they need help. Entering the social media realm is not only smart, but it’s an arguably necessary step to growing your business. Since so much of our lives happen on social media, this is where you're going to find most of your audience, and in return, where they will find you. However, before we begin, there are a few elements we should go over, including social media privacy and the best social media practices to adopt in consideration of privacy.
While expanding to social media is highly beneficial because it will allow you to reach a larger audience and gain higher engagement on your page, you are right to be thinking about privacy concerns. According to Gohar Kahn, the author of “Creating Value with Social Media Analytics,” social media introduces new risks including privacy, security and legal risks. Legal risks include what a company can lose due to a lack of knowledge of the laws and regulations. Essentially, this entails what your customers or competitors can sue or be sued for, (Kahn). In case you’ve ever heard of defamation, libel and slander, all of this falls under legal risks. For example, if your company’s social media page were to post something on social media that ruins the reputation of someone else, your company could be sued for defamation because each of these legal risks has the same rules when it comes to social media businesses. A good strategy to prevent this would be to ensure you always have an updated social media use policy that clearly shows how employees should be posting on the platform.
Another important legal risk to discuss is trademarking. Trademarks allow companies, even on social media, to brand their own logos and phrases. For example, if you want your name to stay as your branding, you can get a trademark on it to formally make it yours. Therefore, if anyone tries to take it, they can be sued.
Furthermore, on social media, a privacy issue on the business-end may arise if a user’s data is found, used or shared without the person’s knowledge. A good way to avoid this type of issue is to be transparent with your users. According to Kahn, research shows that users are more inclined to willingly share their personal data if the platform is transparent about using their data. This can be as small as an alert on the bottom of the page with a “click here for more” link. Additionally, most laws say that businesses cannot collect personal data unless they are using it for a legal purpose or the functions of the social media page cannot be carried out without this information (such as how Uber needs your location to send a car). If you do not follow these guidelines, it is possible that your page could be liable for accessing publicly available information, if it harms the individual (Kahn). The solution to this is to always seek informed consent from the individuals.
Moreover, there are plenty of other privacy laws to take a look at going forward, however, I know you’re also concerned with your own privacy on social media. Sharing your photos will not compromise your privacy any more than sharing your name online will. Data on social media is classified into two categories, public and private. Public data includes profile photos, usernames, country, and any other information that you make public. Private data consists of email addresses, phone numbers, gender, address, etc. This data cannot be accessed by your everyday viewers and this is the type of data that can compromise you, not your pictures. According to Buytendijk and Heiser (Financial Times, 2013) people just need the “triple identifier” – your birthday, gender and postcode to identify 87% of Americans in publically available databases. This means that information is something you should keep much more secure rather than pictures.
The last few recommendations I have to safely use social media is to 1. Have a two-factor authenticator when logging into your account so that hackers cannot easily get in 2. Use a strong password and change it frequently and 3. Provide education and spread awareness about the legal issues we discussed so that all your employees can understand.
In a world where social media dominates both our personal and professional lives, building your company on these platforms is imperative to stay with the changing times. Social media offers a wide variety of benefits including social media analytics and tracking. By building on social media, you’ll be able to keep track of just how well your company is doing by measuring its engagements, impressions and interactions. You can keep track of how many new people are seeing your page and the trends in your sales within the last week, month, or even year. Plus, there are tools such as reels and hashtags that can help expand your business to an even larger audience depending on the platform. There is a world full of analytics to explore on social media that can help you discover which business tactics are working and which can be improved. Moving to social media will be a smart and justified transition for your goals.
Sincerely,
Vanessa Blasi
Citation:
Khan, Gohar F. Creating Value with Social Media Analytics: Managing, Aligning, and Mining Social Media Text, Networks, Actions, Location, Aps, Hyperlinks, Multimedia, and Search Engines Data. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018.