Today social media and social media marketing has grown into a huge sphere that’s far from being only for leisure and entertainment now: many people build their whole careers up on social media platforms, and having their pages kept secure is a very important point for them. They do many things here: receive messages (that can include dangerous links), buy Instagram followers (that also should be bought safely, we’ll talk about it further in the text), communicate with their audience and colleagues. And although everybody has heard about the cases when people have lost their pages because of fraud, not all of them are following general advice on how to make their pages safe. If they did, there would be way fewer cases of accounts being hacked.
Why do they even hack Instagram pages in the first place?
The huge popularity of the social network has significantly increased the value of accounts, which means that there are those who want to get big and developed accounts dishonestly. The effort and time that was put into the promotion of a certain page cost a lot, and sometimes, when people sell their profiles to other people so they could use the audience that the first owner was able to gain, the price is very high (but is totally reasonable).
At the same time, passwords are stolen not only from the owners of promoted profiles that can be used for making money (spam mailings), but also from ordinary people who are hacked by automatic means (account data gets into the database and is subsequently used or sold by attackers) or for personal reasons. In any case, making your account safe sounds great and reasonable, so let’s figure out what you can do right now to never have your data stolen and used for a scam. You can learn hacking to protect you data. In fact, there are many instagram hacking apps you can check out to learn quickly.
1. Come up with a really decent password
We can give you small advice on how to do that easily and quickly. Come up with a sentence that you know by heart: it can be a phrase out of the song or a poem, or a meme – whatever you won’t be having difficulties with to remember at all times. Take the first letters out of the words of this phrase and put them into a sequence; then translate those letters into the latin alphabet. And there you have your password! It is best if this phrase has some punctuation marks and numbers in it, if not, make sure to add some to make the password even stronger.
2. Prohibit access to third-party applications to your account.
Most of the times when we upload a new app and it requires access to our social media we don’t think about it twice and give access straight away. Meanwhile, the app itself can be dangerous, or it can be sold to fraudsters in the future and then the app can become dangerous. To make yourself secure, go to settings, security, apps and sites. There you will see a list of applications associated with the profile. Turn off everything you don’t need or use daily.
3. Make sure that your account is linked to your actual mobile phone, email or personal FB profile.
There have been many cases when people have forgotten to change their mobile phone or email and got into trouble because of that. Update into and never ignore the need to do that – it’s a must, if you want to keep your page safe.
4. When you buy real Instagram followers, make sure that you do it safely.
You should make sure that a company that you’re going to purchase subs from doesn’t require any info rather than your username and your email to send the payment related data. The website’s manager should never ask you for the password of your profile, or email/phone that it is bound to. If something like this happens, you should quickly realize that you’re communicating with a fraud company.
5. Everybody has heard of the two-factor authentication – if you haven’t yet done it, do it right now.
Go to settings and security, two-factor authentication. After you enable this function, you’re going to receive codes via SMS every time that something is about to be changed about your profile, or if somebody tries to enter your profile from a foreign location or device.
6. If this is a business page, take away the access to the page from the former employees.
If the manager was working straight from the page, it would be enough to simply change the password, but if the access was given through the FB business cabinet, you should cancel it through the “roles” tab. You can do it on FB, go to settings and then click on the “page roles” after that. There you will see the list of people who can impact on your page one way or another, and you will also be able to change that by clicking on each person and either changing their role or deleting them.
7. From time to time check the authorizations (devices and locations) in the section account logins.
If you see weird, foreign locations in the list, you should quickly change your password – perhaps someone else is using your account.
8. Never open any links that you’re seeing in the comments under your posts or in the direct messages.
It often happens that these links carry dangerous information or fishing links that can “steal” your data and use it in favor of fraudsters.
9. Never link the same email address that you have used to register on Instagram as the email for connection with your audience.
Create a new email address so that people on IG could use it to write you clients’ letters and work offers.
Summing up
Please, never ignore any weird happenings around your Instagram page – don’t hesitate to change the password or check the settings through Instagram or FB business cabinet, depending on what type of page you’re managing. Plus, don’t forget that you can provide yourself an additional level of safety by using a VPN connection – we’d recommend choosing the paid one, as the safety of its servers are going to be higher and the speed of connection is also going to be much better.
Be careful with the links, purchase third party services attentively and never disclose anybody your personal data.