Month: April 2018

B2B Website Best Practices to Follow in 2018

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

 Digital channel in marketing has changed how leads are generated in B2B business. Today it is completely possible to sit back and watch your leads coming to you.

But this is possible only when you have successful website, effective lead page and a content marketing plan that works.

Your website is your digital presence and it is where your leads will come in contact with your business first.

Therefore it’s important that you have website that best projects your brands as well as convert those leads for you

In this blog we will share best practices to follow for your B2B website in 2018.

But first it’s important to understand objectives for your website.

The requirements of a B2B website are very different from a B2C website. For starters, your deals are generally high value meaning that customers spend a substantial amount of time researching on the solution.

The buying cycle is also longer sometimes running into months or even a year!

You should hence assist your customers in their search. The website that adds most value throughout the buying process will be more likely to convert the lead.

What kind of a site will add value throughout the process? Read on to know.

Target your Site

Your website must be as targeted as your marketing strategy. Who do you want to serve in the market? Is it small business or big corporates?

The next step would be research everything about your target audience. You must have an average visitor’s expectation from your website and even the solutions they are looking for.

Aiia, which is into promotional products, does this beautifully by speaking directly to their customer’s emotion. This is possible only when you know your audience intimately.

B2B Website Best Practices to Follow in 2018

You must design your site for your audience and write in the language they speak. Every industry has its own lingo and jargon.

Speaking in that language will tell your readers that you understand them and have experience in their industry.

Automate Processes

A good website in 2018 must take advantage of automation available today.  You can automate email campaigns right from collecting mail IDs to nurturing your mailing list with an email campaign. Use Auto-responders to confirm visitor actions like sighing up for a webinar or eBook.

A lot of queries can be resolved through an FAQ section or a chatbot. Use of chatbots lowers customer care calls and also resolves customer objections with ease.

In fact according to study by Nuance Enterprise, 75% of customers said they find self-servicing as a convenient way. More customers prefer instant chat based solutions over calling a company executive.

Personalize Experience

With tools such as ConvertKit, Mail Chimp and Optimizely you can personalize your website for each client who visits your website.

The first step is to collect data on how visitors are interacting with your website. Next is to identify segments of visitors and how they differ from each other.

For a B2B website the segments could be region, past purchases, industry and buying stage. Not all information will be available with you but you can use cookies and other tools to identify which category your visitors falls in.

Tools such as Hubspot and Smart Content allow you to create smart lists for your website. For example, all visitors from Asia-Pacific will be shown a different homepage image.

ConvertKit allows you to take specific action based on visitor event. For eg, it adds all the first time visitors to remarketing ad list automatically.

Make it Intuitive

There are so many decisions to make when it comes to design. Design affects how your brand is perceived, your customer experience and even your conversion rates.  Always strive for a website that is intuitive and easy to understand.

Above picture is an example of how your website should NOT be. The visitor has no way to know where he is on the site, there is information load and too many call to actions. Keep the following in point in B2B website design:

  • Show the navigation path (also known as breadcrumb) at the top of your page. It tells the user how they landed on the page
  • Limit call to action to one or two
  • Videos have become very popular but they can also be distracting sometimes. Use manual pay video and avoid autoplay
  • Highlight selected menu option
  • Have thank you pages and action confirmation page like “thank you for signing up”
  • Keep your website design consistent on all pages. Different colors and fonts can cause confusion in visitor’s minds.

Keep Improving

Lastly, maintaining a high converting website is a continuous process. Just implementing the above practices and forgetting about it is not going to make a huge difference in the leads you collect.

For true transformation you must continuously test what is working and what isn’t. Improve something every day and you will soon see that your website can be your biggest source of leads and revenue.

In the fast changing digital world you cannot afford to stop working on your website.

What is the Future of B2B Content Marketing in India

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

What do you think is the future of content from a marketing point of view? How are marketing teams preparing for the sudden upsurge in the demand for B2B content?

How is the world of content marketing expected to evolve in the coming years and what is it that companies must do to stay in-sync with the developments? These are some common questions running in the minds of several business owners.

The world of content marketing has grown bursting with energy. Leading tech players are hiring screenwriters. Content providers are flourishing.

Businesses are constantly battling to create more creative content and design. The strategy of marketing teams is focused more on content marketing plans with the ROI of white papers and blog posts increasing.

The digital marketing community sees content as something that is here to stay. This is primarily because content is, at the end of the day, one of the best and most influential ways of engaging with the target audience at a human level.

It helps to explore new concepts and innovations. It helps to learn new skills and sends out an inspiration to all those reading it.

Content marketing is expected to become more powerful in the coming years. What’s more is the way it is being used. Here are some predictions on how the future of B2B content marketing will shape in India:

Personalized Content

Any marketer would know that there is a plethora of information available online, however, the number of hours with the target audience has reduced significantly.

Readers have shorter attention spans and therefore their demands are changing.

If marketers wish to make an impact and reach out to their target audience in the best manner possible, they must generate personalized, relevant content.

This content must clearly and concisely answer the reader’s query in a short reading time. Technology is also evolving to help marketers appropriately personalize content giving it the right outcome.

Quality is Priority

The same kind of content is being generated by all marketers for the same sets of target audiences. Relevant content is being created by just about everyone and that’s not enough to gain the eyeballs.

Then, how do you get yourself noticed? You need to ensure that your content is high-quality and what you are creating is some of the best resources in your industry. Here are a few key points that can help you churn useful content:

  • Identify the pain points of your industry and offer appropriate solutions. Please note, readers are looking for quick solutions and therefore, you must focus on these.
  • Examples, testimonies, experiences, and case studies have a great impact on the target audience since they are relatable and strike a chord.
  • Act as a content curator providing detailed information about a particular topic using relevant links.
  • Surprise your readers with a list of tactical tips that offer great solutions.

Gone are the days when mediocre content could attract the attention of your target audience. Your content now must be simply ‘amazing’.

Focus on the UX

The success of content marketing will also depend on how your content is presented. Imagine the different situations and moments in which readers are likely to access your content – while commuting to the office, waiting at the doctor’s clinic, just before going to bed, or during their free time at work.

They would sometimes just have a few minutes and at other times have hours. Your UX must be designed in a manner that the content can be scanned and scrolled easily not causing any kind of distractions and disturbances to the reader.

The way you frame your content marketing strategy today will have a great impact on your ROI in the future. Set out to create fewer yet impactful content pieces that can be elaborated upon later.

Content marketing is changing and you need to adapt yourself to the changing strategies. However, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Tailor the content as per the requirements of your target audiences and half the battle is won.

 

How to Market Your Business With LinkedIn

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

LinkedIn is not just limited to job seekers and professionals; nowadays, businesses also make use of this platform for their growth.

Using LinkedIn, you can generate leads by making connections, establishing partnerships and also for creating exceptional brand awareness.

LinkedIn is an expert professional social platform. Organizations have direct access to their customers where they can market with their status updates, pictures and other posts.

As the platform consists of an entirely different crowd, LinkedIn marketing requires an alternative way to get the results you need.

In order to explore LinkedIn as a marketing network, here are 12 marketing hacks you can use to discover new clients, make new contacts, and eventually develop your business.

1. First, make your own profile

You might be wondering why your own profile comes first rather than your company profile on LinkedIn. No! We are not wrong! It is because your profile and the profiles of other employees of your organization make up the roof for your organization’s image on the network.

When targeted audience searches for your name and visits your profile, you need them to discover something catchy that influences you to stand out from other employees of your competitors.

There are a lot of chances to excite the people who view your profile. Focus on completing your profile and after that streamline your profile in the long run; including your new aptitudes, accomplishments, and cases of your outstanding work.

2. Create an outstanding company page

Your company LinkedIn page is important as it showcases your company’s image. Your company page should be simple enough and be inviting for your targeted customers to understand about your organization, learn more about the employees in the association, and hook up with your content.

Creating a company page is of free for everyone, so you don’t need to worry how much to pay for your profile. Need guidance on how to start a free LinkedIn page, you can find it here.

3. Determine your marketing goals

It is crucial to determine your LinkedIn marketing goals which generally include creating leads and raising awareness of the brand.

When you have an idea of what you need to achieve, it will be quite simpler to determine your target audience.

For instance, if your company is making toys and currently only focus on developing their business on one area, you can set your ad campaigns in a manner that it will be only shown to people who come from that particular place or near that place.

4. Enhance company page to find targeted customers

It is important that you need to enhance your company page to find targeted customers. You need to optimize your company page in such a way that it should appear easily when someone is searching for your company details.

Also, company page should be SEO friendly; for that, you need to do the following:

  • Suitable Keywords: Make sure that you include suitable keywords for defining what your company offers. The keywords should be the one the target audience is most probable of searching on the internet.
  • Link to your company website: Linking the company’s LinkedIn page with your company website is crucial as it will help in increasing your search ranking.
    Not only your company website, you can even link to blogs and include marketing materials. Also, make sure employees of your organization update their LinkedIn profiles; as they add your company as their workplace, a link is made back to your company LinkedIn page.
  • Offer consistent content: A standout amongst other approaches to enhance your rankings and to include your company in search results is by consistently sharing relevant content.
    All the more often as possible you share content that engages the audience, the higher your company will show up in Google’s search results.
5. Add the maximum number of followers

When you get followers for your company page, your updates show up specifically on their LinkedIn page. The more followers you have, chances are also higher your updates will get more views.

Encourage your employees to share the content on their page so that it will reach more people. Also don’t forget to promote company page via emails, messages and so on to various people to attract more followers.

Make sure that you add ‘Follow’ button on your page so that the visitors only need to click on that to always get your updates.

6. Post first-rate content

Ensure that your content is of high-quality because it should be engaging and also focus to achieve two objectives. First, it should help others to take care of an issue or how to carry out their activity better.

What’s more, then it sets you up as an ideal thought leader in that space. If you are offering viewers with valuable content, every aspect of it normally prompts more business.

7. Sponsor your high engaging update

Not only constant updates are necessary, but also when one of the updates goes viral you should think of sponsoring that update. It is an advertising strategy where businesses pay to promote their update into a user’s LinkedIn feed.

LinkedIn users have the privilege to select their interested industries so that they don’t have to receive unnecessary updates and messages from other industry.

So a sponsored update can be a fantastic method to promote thought leadership content which is valuable basically for the targeted audience with a solid invitation to take action.

By promoting your content through this system, your business can focus on a speciality crowd, increase visitors to the website and create potential customers if the content is sufficiently convincing. Know more about here.

8. Constantly influence targeted customers

It is essential to have consistent updates on your page. Images, colours, and content should be consistent with your site and other social media profiles of your business.

The page needs to be updated always to create the impression that the brand is dynamic and active. Keep in mind that it makes a terrible impression on audience mind if the social media networks are updated once in a month or haven’t updated in months.

9. Make sure of your custom URL

Everybody should ensure that they have their custom URL with their name, for example, http://linkedin.com/in/yourname. This is particularly critical for individuals who have a great deal of contact with potential customers..

When you ensure that you have your custom URL, you are also ensuring that your LinkedIn profile comes up in the search engine results.

10. Focus first on connections and then on relation building

Through LinkedIn, business owners or entrepreneurs can connect with their prospects, targeted partners, and other entrepreneurs. What’s more, once the connections are made, the owner can choose how to sustain those connections to build a relationship.

11. Utilize LinkedIn Advertisement campaigns

There are two ways of ad campaigns in LinkedIn – self-service ads and paid campaigns. Like setting up your company page, it is also critical to define the ad campaign goals to understand if it is boosting brand awareness, bringing leads, or building relationships.

12. Make use of LinkedIn analytics

When you are done with creating valuable content for your page, don’t think you are done with that. You also need to monitor your targeted audiences’ behaviours and preferences. For that, you need to make use of various analytic methods of LinkedIn.

  • For monitoring and enhancing your company page’s free campaign performance, you can make use of LinkedIn’s company page analytics.
  • Enhance your paid campaign performance with assistance from your LinkedIn campaign manager analytics.

Observing your LinkedIn analytics dashboard day by day can enable you to settle on information based choices that prompt better outcomes.

Sum Up

We hope that this article has helped you in getting an idea to launch and maintain your LinkedIn page to successfully market your products and services. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to share with us. We would love to hear you.

 

What is Mixed Reality & How it Helps Businesses

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Virtual reality with its interactive capabilities takes users to an alternate world. Mixed Reality (MR), on the other hand, is a combination of both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality .

It changes how users create, connect, and interact with a holographic experience. This has made MR the ideal choice for businesses that aim at improving their operational productivity using holographic experiences.

In recent times, many business organizations want to benefit from the scope of ‘immersive experiences’. Therefore, they tend to implement augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality.

The most popular and common approach out of these three for a business is mixed reality. This is because it has certain unique capabilities apart from creating an immersive experience.

Mixed Reality can aptly combine both the physical and digital worlds creating enterprise-focused applications. Several enterprises today are investing in the development of MR dependent applications to offer users with a digital experience.

Popularly available mixed reality devices include Microsoft HoloLens and ODG headsets. These devices enable various enterprises to improve their efficiency and task management.

How does Mixed Reality Work?

Mixed Reality is a combination of both the virtual and real worlds. It combines physical and digital objects enabling users to collaborate with both in real time.

Mixed Reality has some extremely powerful features such as recording physical surroundings, tracking gestures, language processing for recognition of voice, and more. Its practical uses with a distinctive approach to communicating and collaborating give enterprises an edge over other technologies with real-world, real-time experiences.

Mixed Reality vs. Virtual Reality – which is better?

Virtual reality keeps the user away from the surroundings. While some VR headsets allow for limited movement, most do not especially in comparison with MR devices like HoloLens.

Mixed reality connects the real world of the user with 3D visuals but does not disconnect the virtual and real from each other.

Additionally, while using MR devices, the user does not have to limit mobility and can complete other productive tasks.

MR clearly wins over VR in this aspect making MR a more impactful technology for enterprises. VR is still in its development phase.

Challenges with respect to real-time processing and consideration of physical surroundings must be eliminated to make VR a more enterprise-focused solution.

Businesses utilizing mixed reality have higher chances of becoming productive since they offer a rich experience and personalized views without creating any kind of disconnect from the other views.

How does Mixed Reality help businesses?

Healthcare

The healthcare industry has greatly benefitted from MR applications. Now, there are 3D operation rooms with options for broadcasting and virtual organ replicas to understand complicated surgeries.

These systems allow for knowledge and skill enhancement with AI technologies, sensors, and data analytics put to use for the purpose of practicing evidence-based medicine with care.

Manufacturing

The use of mixed reality headsets helps to improve the performance of all industry operations right from assembly lines to supply chains. The overall designing and maintenance of the product can also be taken care of with the help of MR features and applications.

Manufacturers can easily collaborate in real-time with other departments of the organization leading to improved efficiency. MR solutions are also apt for quick prototyping, instant decision making, and 3D model visualization.

Real Estate

Mixed reality can be used by builders to give their clients a 360° virtual tour of the property they intend to sell. This property may be in the development or planning stage.

Furthermore, mixed reality lets clients customize the furniture, the color of the walls, and other designing aspects making it easier for them to make decisions.

Retail

Stores with mixed reality offer real-time experience to their clients. This means that customers can check for new offers, explore visual designs, move around to view some of the superimposed items, and mix and match to decide what they would like to buy.

Closing thoughts

While the technology of mixed reality is still emerging, it is definitely worth considering for most enterprises. Advancements, new hardware, and more such applications will keep evolving as the technology grows.

Therefore, this is the right time for businesses to invest in MR as it has the ability to change the way businesses and customers work, interact, and communicate.

 

How to Boost Your Social Media Strategy

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Social media is getting bigger each day. Social media networks play a vital role in developing your business because more people are using social media networks each day.

Statistics say that more than 2.5 billion people use social media networks and it is expected to grow more in future.

Marketers must depend on something beyond hashtags to take advantage of channels such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.

Social media marketers use a variety of refined strategies to boost their brand awareness, attract new customers and drive more business, and definitely satisfy the followers.

Let’s take a look at these 11 ways to boost your social media strategy.

1. Write down your game plan

Create a game plan for your brand and stick to it. Only a few marketers make use of a written social media strategy; the marketers with a game plan are more likely to be successful with their content marketing rather than those who don’t have.

Statistics states that marketers who write down their game plan have more than 80% success rate in their marketing. Begin with the goals you wish to achieve and develop a strategy to accomplish them.

2. Concentrate on multichannel

A few years ago, Twitter was the decisive platform for social media marketers. Not much later, Facebook took over the scene and now, Instagram is trending!

So in the future, it’s unpredictable that which social media platform will be the main focus for the social media marketers. Also, marketers should understand that it’s foolish to concentrate on a single media. Rather, they should concentrate on various social media channels to focus on their targeted customers.

Also, social media marketers must adopt a multichannel strategy for achieving prospects and clients. Make sure that you use each channel in a unique manner to attract more followers and encourage them to follow your brand.

3. Develop and follow a content calendar

It’s a high chance that you might miss out an important event which you could have utilized for your social media marketing. To avoid such situations, it’s never late to create a social media content calendar.

Social media content calendar can help you in following ways:

  • Your brand’s content will be organized
  • Provides fuel for inspiration and brainstorming
  • You will not miss important dates and events
  • Improves team performance
  • Saves time
  • Allot appropriate resources more efficiently
  • Provides a better understanding of what works for your brand and what not
4. Define your target audience

Most of the companies don’t have a proper idea of who are their target audience. So first, you have to define your target audience.

Social media gives you the option to filter your customers; it will filter who most probably will buy what your brand is offering. Thus, you will be able to save your money by avoiding marketing to ‘not interested’ category customers and also you only need to market to right customers. This will not only save your money but also your time and energy.

Analyse your brand followers and create content that suits their tastes and interests. Address their issues, concerns, and questions. Also, take advantage of Facebook ad tools to promote your content to attract more customers.

5. Set social media goals

Managing social media is a daunting task and chances are high that you will lose the battle easily if you don’t have a proper plan to stick on to it.

Many companies fail in this area because they haven’t set a proper goal for managing their social media activity. Not only for social media but also every investment for your business need to have a proper goal defined. By this way, you will be able to develop a strategy for it, execute it, analyze your efforts and results achieved. This will, in turn, establish Return On Investment (ROI).

Goals should be set for the following areas:

  • Increasing growth of the brand page which includes likes and followers
  • Customer engagement
  • Increasing traffic to landing page of your website
  • To increase leads and sales
6. Make an investment in influencer marketing

As per one of the latest study, almost 95% of marketers believe in influencer marketing and they claim it to be effective. Some of the popular brands such as Nike and Rolex depend on influencer marketing to target their followers.

Nowadays, internet users have turned out to be careful about advertisements that usually appear on the internet. So to battle this, a few brands depend on sponsored content made by social media influencers to create more connections with the targeted audience.

7. Quickly engage your commenters

Most social media networks depend on algorithms to figure out what content is displayed mainly and what content is avoided. Facebook and Instagram utilize engagement as an essential factor in figuring out what content should be displayed and what not.

One major type of engagement is comments. Posts that get more comments are frequently shown compared to other social media feeds.

To encourage individuals from your targeted group to engage more with your content more significantly, assign a designated person who is prepared to respond to user/customer comments immediately.

The quicker you respond to the comments, the more probable it is that various customers will engage with your content too. If you can comment in a way that feels on-brand and exceptional, you may even have the capacity to enhance brand sentiment in your targeted audience.

8. Reach out look-alike audiences

Incredible social media marketing doesn’t simply depend simply on content to increase reach for customers. It should also incorporate some paid elements to intensify reach, particularly once you have set up a solid strategy.

Look-alike audiences depend on the algorithms created by social media networks to enable you to connect with clients who are like your ideal customer profile.

You only need to upload a list of email address related to your best clients to a platform like Facebook, and it will recognize different clients with a comparable demographic and psychographic features.

At that point, you can run advertisements to drive viewers to your site or business page. In course of time, this strategy will help you to rapidly grow a more advantageous and healthier social media following.

9. Make use of analysis for measuring existing strategy

Analytics is an ideal approach to understand whether your social media strategy is working. Obviously, it is best to measure various metrics like follower growth, distribution, and engagement.

Based on what you discover using a tool like Google Analytics, you will know whether your current strategy will prompt significant business results.

10. Develop a unique brand identity

Social media networks are so much crowded with feeds which force customers to always reconsider what they do and don’t need inside their feeds. Therefore, it is crucial that your brand develops a convincing and unique identity. If not, your social media presence will end up like any other usual pages.

Build up a strategy that explains extraordinary and unique brand identity from a blend of multimedia content to lead your story.

11. Delight followers

Finding creative ways to please online followers is an awesome method to build more followers through word of mouth and amplification.

Build up an editorial calendar and ensure that you add delightful moments that impact followers to like your organization. The most outstanding way to do this by creating a fun midweek video that is engaging and entertaining can be an extraordinary approach to bring happiness to social media users in a different way.

Final Thoughts

Social media trends are always changing, so are the marketing tactics. However, strategies said above will remain the same.

Concentrate on multichannel social media strategy that conveys your brand’s image and brings enjoyment to followers. In course of time, you need to build up a large social media following suited for driving enormous business to your organization.

If you have any questions related to this article, please feel free to let us know.

27 Website Audit Tools to Use in 2018 [Infographic]

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Strictly speaking, website audit is done solely for marketing purposes. It’s a detailed analysis of all aspects that affect website’s visibility in search engines. This standard method gives you insights on actions needed to improve SEO for your website.

There are different types of website audits .Some of the popular types of audits are Website Health Audits, Security Audits, Competitive Site Audits and Red Flag Recovery Audits. Usually SEOs find it difficult to perform website audits manually.

They always look for the best tools to make their SEO work easier. Thanks to website audit tools. We don’t need to spend much time on manual website audits owing to hundreds of website audit tools available on Internet. But make sure you choose quality tools to perform website audit for your website.

12 Top Tech Trends to Watch in 2018 [Infographic]

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Marketers always need to stay up-to-date with the technology trends. Many are wondering what all changes are going to happen in 2018. We had a tremendous year in 2017 with so many predictions in technology related to AI and Augmented Reality (AR).

Obviously, 2018 will likely be the extension of those developments or ideas that started to take hold over the past couple of months. Of course, there may be surprises as well.

You might have heard about the first Media Day of CES 2018 kicked off in Las Vegas. Many presentations on foreseeable tech trends have been done in the event. We have created an infographic on core industry trends and patterns presented at the 2018 tech trends to watch session.

Tech prediction list includes trends such as 5G, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Smart Cities, Augmented Reality (AR), and so on.

Let’s have a look on these 12 anticipated tech trends to watch in 2018.

Top Tech Trends to Watch in 2018-min

How Secure is Your Social Media Profiles

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Recently, you have been hearing so much about Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal. This makes us think about how much secure is social media profiles and what you can do to make it secure.

There are few things to keep in mind while handling social media. First, let’s take a look at the recent Facebook scandal and get an idea of what happened exactly.

What exactly is this Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal?

It all started when the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica gathered private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their authorization. This was one of the biggest data leaks in the history of the social network.

This breach enabled the organization to exploit the social media activity of a large population of the American electorate and creating techniques that supported its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

After effects of Facebook Data Leak

This major data leak has affected the Facebook users worldwide. Not only normal users got agitated but also advertisers began pulling ads from Facebook, organizations started wiping out Facebook log-in functions, a large number of users are creating #deletefacebook campaign and more. What’s more? All these resulted in a dramatic drop in the stock price of Facebook.

Not only Facebook but also high profile Twitter accounts are targeted by cybercriminals. These criminals hack the Twitter accounts and direct message to the contacts in the victim’s account with purposeful publicity about their motivation or attempt and convince the victim’s contact to click on a scam link.

Also, these issues have raised a question in social media users about how secure is their information in social media. So it’s high time to concentrate on securing your social media accounts. Let’s take a look at the common kind of threats in social media and ways to avoid them and staying safe.

1. Identity theft

Cybercriminals gather your personal information from social media sites as said before. Regardless of opting for highest security settings, still there are chances of your information getting leaked.

Most of the social media sites have the basic data like the birth date or email address, which can be used by a hacker to hack your email address easily. Let’s take an example, cybercriminals commonly hack the information by using the common technique of “forgot password.”

When a user clicks on that and tries to recover the account by email address, then the hacker can easily access your data and at that point, they have the complete access of your social media sites.

No need to panic or to delete your social media accounts. You only need to take these precautions listed below:

  • Strong password

Ensure you have a strong password for your accounts. Make it hard enough to guess. Make use of a mix of special characters like symbols or capital letters while creating your password. Also, take note that you don’t use your birthday or spouse/kid’s name on your password.

  • Be careful while updating status

Cybercriminals usually search for status updates to get any vital information for them. The most common mistake we often do is posting status updates on birthdays of your parents and tagging them in that post.

From these posts, chances are high that the hackers, for example, get the maiden name of your mom which can be used by the hacker to answer the security questions like “What’s your mother’s maiden name?.” If you are sharing that kind of updates, you are risking yourself and your social media accounts.

  • Never reveal your location

Social media sites usually ask these questions and it’s not necessary that you correctly enter it. Use fake location or leave that column. Don’t let your actual location published on social media.

2. Phishing scams

Phishing scams are fake messages pretending to be sent from famous organizations that you are likely to trust. Those are sent via emails, text messages, social media platforms etc.

These scams often come with a link leading to a fake website where you will be tricked to enter your details which will be confidential such as online banking details, credit card details etc. So make sure that you never give usernames or passwords.

The best practice is to never click on the links from emails you are not expecting even if it sounds from a genuine site or an organization. Make sure that the link is safe, for that you need to check these:

  • Hover over the suspicious link

Before clicking a link, hover over it; then it will show the full URL in the lower corner of your browser. If you recognize that website, then go ahead and click that link.

  • Link scanner

If you are not sure about the authenticity link, use a link scanner. It is a website which allows you to enter the URL you are suspicious about and checks whether the URL is safe. URLVoid and MyWOT are some of the link scanners.

  • Shortened links

Shortened links are most commonly seen on sites like Twitter where the character count is limited. Sites like Sucuri checks whether the real URL is safe or not.

3. Cookie monster

When you use social media sites, you post a lot of your personal information. Once it is out, then it is not private. Your enemies can use this information to harm you.

Also, you visit lots of pages and hit “like” button on the pages you like. These pages can extract your information and use it for their purpose like we have discussed above.

The pages you subscribe, applications you have downloaded and social networking site’s games and all contain your personal data.

The pages you visit can put invisible cookies on your site which are used to track your activities and your online behaviours.

To avoid this, click on “Do Not Track” feature on these sites. Also, you can regularly clear cache and cookies on your browser to avoid any malpractices.

4. Don’t share your holiday plans

If you are going on for a vacation, you need not announce that on social media sites. Letting the world know that you are away from home can attract burglars to your house.

Don’t let the world know where you are going, how long you are going and where you are staying. Burglars are constantly searching for information and these updates can do no good than harm.

Keep these things in mind when you are going for vacations:

  • Never post about your holiday plans like where you are going, how long etc.
  • Even if you want to post pictures, post that only after coming home under a title like vacation album or something.
  • Opt for highest privacy control. Select the audience group for your pictures and posts like friends, relatives.
5. Never be overconfident

Most of the people think that if they have a firewall or an antivirus installed, they are safe. Also thinking that you don’t have data worth to be hacked, then you are wrong!

With the advanced technology, you are connected with more people. With your carelessness and negligence, you are also risking other people’s information also.

Avoid posting the following information online:

  • Information regarding banking activities
  • Address and birth date
  • Your spouse/kid’s name, school/work details, their birth dates
  • Your workplace location
  • Your daily activities

These kinds of information can be exploited by criminals for identity theft, to access your bank account, take loans or credit cards under your name.

Final Thoughts

Despite these threats, you can make use of social media sites; however, you have to play it safe to ensure that your data doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

Now that you know what are the possible threats that you are vulnerable to and the ways you can avoid it, we believe that these tips can help you in protecting yourself and your social media accounts.

If you have any questions, please feel free to share your thoughts. We would love to hear you.