How to Keep Your Information Private on Social Media
Scenario:
"You are an online marketer. You mainly rely on email marketing and social media. A new prospect reaches out to hire you for her online consulting business. She uses her name for her branding. However, she is very much concerned about privacy issues in social media. She is overwhelmed with the idea of using her pictures or videos. Write an email to convince her that it is essential to effectively use social media as a marketing channel especially if someone has an online business. Suggest best practices for using social media safely."
Scenario
Before we begin to draft our email, let's first analyze the scenario to extract the information we need to explain to the prospect. We need to 1. Address her concerns about privacy issues on social media 2. Convincer her that social media is essential for marketing and 3. Suggest ways to use social media safely.
Privacy:
In regards to this scenario, I think it's ironic that the prospect is concerned about privacy, even though her name is the brand. If her consulting business is new, I might suggest changing her brand name to something other than her actual name to protect her identity. If the prospect wants to promote her business without putting her information out the to the world, she can create an email and telephone number specific to the business (which is best practice anyway). Instead of using her own photos and videos, she can outsource and use stock photos on her website and point to related videos from YouTube. The same goes with social media, the information, photos, and videos on social channels should promote the ideas of the business, and not her.
Social Media:
Everyone has social media. Driving web traffic to your website through SEO and paid ads on Google isn't enough these days. If you want to be seen, you need to be on social media. Not only can a presence on social channels create brand awareness, but it allows you to target your market. If the prospect finds out through analytics data, or her own data, that her main target audience are males ages 30-50, then she would target these men through specific social channels with ads and drive sales. The prospect would do well with putting out ads on LinkedIn, for example.
Best Practices:
Best practices for using social media safely. When running a business social media account, do not input your personal information. Do not link your personal phone number, email, address, etc. When posting, sometimes the social channel will ask to post your location, do not share your location! Do your best to keep your business information and personal informations separate.
Email:
Dear _______,
Thank you for reaching out! I completely understand your privacy concerns regarding using social media to market your business. If your business is new, I might suggest a change to the name of your brand to protect your personal identity. Have you created a work phone number and email? Keeping your personal information separate from your business information would be the first step in ensuring your privacy.
I know that social media can be intimidating, but having a social media presence creates a large amount of awareness that your business is out there. Being on social media channels allows you to advertise directly to your target market as well. You can be incredibly successful in marketing directly where your market is.
If you decide to create social media accounts, do not input your personal information and do not share your location. You can link all of your business account information to these social channels. If you are worried about sharing your own photos, you can find a lot of stock images online to match what you are looking for.
I hope this information was helpful to you and please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or for more information!
Sincerely,
___________
I can understand privacy concerns and how scary it can be to put your personal information out into the world. The best thing to do is to just keep your personal and business information separate if possible. If you can opt out of filling in any bits of information, then do it! The key is just being careful of what information you are putting out there. What do you think? Is this what you would have written in this scenario?