In the Help Me With HIPAA podcast, 5 Steps For Securing Your Social Media – Ep 339, Donna and David explore why it is smart to secure your social media accounts. You might ask yourself what is the big deal? What is the worst that could happen? Well, someone might get your follower list and try to phish them… but that’s not all! Listen to the podcast and learn some of the things that could happen and what you should be doing to secure your social media accounts.

Isn’t it convenient when you get the option to use your Facebook (or other social media account) username and password to log into other websites? It is, especially when it helps you from having to create and remember another darn password! Then, before you know it, you can’t even remember how many sites are using your Facebook username and password. But, what if your Facebook account gets hacked…what then? The hacker now has access to ALL of those sites that you have used your Facebook credentials to login to. Now we have a problem! What if your business’ social media accounts are hacked and the hacker starts emailing your clients or followers things that look like they are coming from you! See where I am going here? This could cause reputation damage for sure.

How would a business even start to secure their social media accounts? If you’ve listened to Donna and David’s podcast in the past, you know that everything starts with creating a policy and procedure! In the policy you want to have things like, what social media accounts are allowed, who manages these accounts and what is and isn’t allowed to be posted. Don’t give the entire office access to these accounts. If you are going to hire an outside company to manage your accounts, make sure you vet them. Do they even know what HIPAA is? Oh, and don’t forget to create an incident response plan so that your team knows what to do if your social media accounts get hacked.

Listen to this episode of The Help Me With HIPAA, for more information on protecting your social media accounts and count how many times Donna can use the term exacerbate in one episode. Threats to privacy and security are everywhere and this includes all of the social media accounts you have. Protecting them can help protect your business’ reputation.