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With the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites, many companies are finding it beneficial to create a profile on these sites. Marketing online with the help of social media has lead many to increase their revenue a lot. Would it be wise though to focus all efforts on these sites and forget about your website?

That would be a huge mistake! The fact is Websites and social media should work hand in hand to promote your business properly. If you simply use social media, there is very little that you will be able to accomplish.

Social media sites have a limit when it comes to the number of characters you can post. This means you can’t say much at once. Only on a website can you do this. You can give more information about your business if you have a website.

The key is  balance. Keep your website. In fact, upgrade it and do whatever you can to get its ranks up. Then use Social media to direct traffic to your site. This will be a far better strategy.

What companies should all keep in mind is that social media cannot stand alone. For you to be effective, you have to use other online marketing techniques and bring them together on your social media sites.

In other words, social media needs to support a company’s Web site, and a Web site needs to support a company’s social media efforts. They complement and work for each other as opposed to competing. It’s not an either/or proposition.

More information here.

The dangers social media poses has become something  Britain’s Military of Defense is planning to focus more on. It will be initiating a new campaign with the goal of educating it’s personnel  on the dangers of releasing too much personal information.

“Guarding personal information released into cyberspace is as important as defending a barracks from attack,” the ministry says. That’s the message the Ministry of Defense wants to get across to all recruits and service,” officials said.

The campaign, aptly named “Think Before You …,” is a security guide for social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. It aims to decrease the risk of service personnel who are at an increased risk of attack online from potentially releasing too much information about themselves or military operations.

Does this mean that the organization is going against social media? Not really. They understand the right everyone has to open whatever account he wishes on cyberspace. The campaign is simply after awareness. This will be a huge way to make everyone understand the responsibility they have to keep both the organization and themselves free from any cyber attacks.

The same principle can be applied to other businesses. It’s not a matter of banning social media in the office  but simply a matter of keeping people up-to-date and fully aware about their online responsibility towards the company.

Read more here.

Many Facebook users can relate to the fact that this social networking site simply isn’t what it used to be.  If you think about it, the reason you may have had for joining this site is probably to keep in contact with friends. You wanted to have that ‘inside peek’ on what’s happening in their lives since you couldn’t be with them physically. Everything just seemed to be so simple  with this site. This idealism is changing and fast. Users are leaving Facebook for good. Why?

“People are becoming aware of the limitations of Facebook’s semi-public, ‘all of your friends under one roof’ system,” said Dr Bernie Hogan of the Oxford Internet Institute. “As soon as mum joins Facebook, people have to make sure Facebook is mum-safe. If a teacher becomes friends with a student on Facebook, they have to make sure the content is appropriate for their role as a teacher. What that does is water down one’s capacity to fully express oneself in this space.”

Since the site has become extremely popular, it’s becoming very hard to limit the people who you want to interact with. You have to really think twice before posting anything on these sites: What will Mum say if she saw this? Is this really something I want people to know? Will this affect my reputation? All these questions are making Facebook somewhat of a hassle to use. You don’t have the freedom to post ‘whatever you want’ anymore.

Then is the ‘keeping up with your appearance online’ problem. With everyone able to see your photos, comparing is something that comes naturally. So you end up spending too much time ‘beating’ other people’s poses. This social competition online can be depressing if you are on the ‘loosing side’. It’s like if you aren’t popular on FB , you’re nobody.

Other than this is the issue of privacy. With the increase of cyber attacks, there is no assurance that your personal information won’t get into the wrong hands. Once it’s out there,  you really can’t control where it ends up. With the constant changes in the features on Facebook such as the  recent issue of face tagging, people don’t feel safe on Facebook any longer.

The result? People figure if you really are friend’s you’d keep in touch the old fashioned way.

Read more on this here.

The founders of today’s common social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn had absolutely no idea of the impact these social networking sites would have. What started out as a simple way for college students to keep in touch has become a worldwide network connecting not only individuals but businesses and organizations. This unexpected popularity has brought about a very important issue: SECURITY.

The ‘safety’ that users felt on these sites is slowly becoming questionable. These sites have become the places hackers and other ‘cyber criminals’ find their prey. The bottom line is everyone-moderators of these sites included must pay more attention to their online security.   You think your social networking site has done all they can to ‘ensure your safety?’

Security researcher Rishi Narang recently discovered a security flaw with LinkedIn’s use of cookies and, as a result, the site reduced the persistence of cookies it uses to identify users. Patches and updates from the social networks themselves occur on a daily basis in an effort to combat crucial security flaws. As of the writing of this article, in 2011, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have undergone updates 528 times, with over 50 updates occurring on Facebook alone.

The fact is no matter how hard owners of these sites may be trying, it will be hard to keep up to pace with hackers.  Apart from that is the problem of confidential information finding its way to wrong hands. An example of this is of  Scott McClellan, the chief technologist and interim vice president of engineering for HP’s new cloud services business. Scott ‘carelessly’ posted the company’s plans on his LinkedIn page which wasn’t supposed to go public yet.  Though the comment was later removed, the damage had clearly been done.

How can a ‘safer’ social networking site be created then? No doubt, these sites are doing all they can to try and update their settings. As users though, there is much that can be done to try and minimize the chances of becoming a victim of these cyber attacks.

Being careful before clicking on something our friends’ have posted will be a big step. We may be trusting by nature but clicking on unknown links may open the way for hackers to access our information.

Another factor has to do with confidentiality. Though you do have the right to rant and rave on your page, avoid mentioning things that you don’t have the ‘right’ to share. This is especially true when it comes to company policies or updates. Keep your personal social networking sites PERSONAL.

Keep yourself well-informed as to updates these sites have made security-wise.  You may have to update your profiles’ security settings to keep yourself protected.

For more information, read the source article.