How to Protect yourself while Using Social Media

As a part of my job, I present to mom groups about Social Media . I get lots of questions about how to “protect” yourself while exposing yourself and your business online.

How do you prevent odd comments on your blog?

In Blogger and in WordPress under the Settings tab, there is an option where you can moderate comments that are made on your blog. That means that whenever anyone comes to your blog and makes a comment you can choose to have that comment go straight to your email so that you can decide whether or not you want to allow that comment on your blog.

How do you protect yourself from strange followers on Twitter?

There are 2 settings on Twitter. You can have a public setting or a private setting. When you have a private setting people need to request to follow you. A request is sent to your email and then you can decide to allow them to follow or not. Then if you have a public setting anyone can come along and follow you. You can then go to your Followers page, click on that person’s profile info. Check them out, are they a good fit for your product? Is it someone you would like to follow? Do they just not seem like a good fit? Then you can choose not to follow them back or if they seem very suspicious you can block them. Whenever anyone decides to follow me, I always check out their profile. If there are hardly any tweets on their account or sometimes there are 0 tweets and they are just following a bunch of people, more than likely they are spammers, don’t follow them or block them.

Can you get viruses and worms from Social Media?

Yes- make sure you have good anti-spy, and anti-virus ware on your computer ladies!

How to protect yourself from the Twitter Worm- Instructions for your computer

Mashable.com is a great resource where you can keep up on the latest info in social media. Follow them on Twitter, they will usually put out tweets about worms and malware.