Facebook alone has over 850+ million users who spend a whopping 700 billion minutes a month using it. Twitter has more than 200 million and counting visitors with at least 65 million tweets a day. Youtube has more than 500 million worldwide visitors and it boasts of 92 billion views a month.
Clearly, social media is a gigantic “new media” and both businesses (stake holders of businesses such as employees) and customers are all on social media.
Social media is also most likely to topple email over, as a preferred mode of communication. According to Gartner, Social network services will replace email as a primary choice for Interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
Today businesses use social media for hiring, managing employees, developing their brands, and to create buzz before product launches. Social media also determines how businesses create new business contacts; manage relationships; conduct sales and marketing; and much more.
Increasingly, social media is transforming the way companies engage with their customers and with employees. Social media is also a business channel in a way where it helps businesses tap into additional income streams.
If there are crowds, there’s bound to be trouble. As alluring as social media is, it’s also brings in possibility for nefarious behavior and security risks.
According to a McAfee study conducted in partnership with Vanson Bourne (a global research agency) and Purdue University’s CERIAS group, the social media adoption rate is an astounding 90% in countries such as India, Spain, and Brazil. The rate is about 70% for the U.S, U.K, Australia, and Canada. Yet, 50% of more than 1000 companies surveyed for this study cited security as their main concern with social media. An unbelievable 70% of the companies surveyed did experience a security breach including data loss, phishing, malware exposure, etc.
A security breach like that is expensive. The study reports losses accounting to more than US $1 billion due to social media security breaches. Here are some more startling revelations:
- An average financial loss related to a social media security incident costs upwards of US $2 million
- Large businesses have a lot more to use with financial losses amounting to US $4.5 million.
- At least 60% of organisations report that the worst damage inflicted on their companies relate to reputation and brand while 14% of them report litigation costs.
As far as security is concerned, one of the most critical perspectives is unwanted, additional data. In some other cases, it’s unplanned loss or sensitive data. Next week, we’ll look at some social media security best practices and solutions for making your social media use safer and more beneficial for your business.
714-333-9620