Social Media

Hackers Don’t Take Holidays – Ransomware Is On The Rise

December 14, 2023

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Studies have shown up to a 70% increase in attempted ransomware attacks during the holiday season.

Although we may be planning for a restful holiday ahead, full of delicious food and time with loved ones, hackers are not. Their ongoing exploitation of vulnerabilities and ever-changing tactics requires you and your team to be as vigilant as ever.

Phishing attacks have reached record highs this year. Worryingly, in the third quarter of this year alone, phishing attacks skyrocketed by a staggering 173%, compared to the previous three months.

And malware? It’s not far behind, with a 110% increase over the same period.

Let’s put this into perspective. Imagine you’re on a quiet beach, enjoying the sun and the surf. Suddenly, the tide starts to rise rapidly. Before you know it, your picnic basket is floating away, and you’re knee-deep in water. That’s what’s happening in the cyber world right now.

According to a report, the ‘phisherfolk’ group were most active in August, casting out more than 207.3 million phishing emails. That’s nearly double the amount in July. September wasn’t much better, with 172.6 million phishing emails.

But who are these cyber criminals targeting? Old favorites Facebook and Microsoft continue to top the charts, with Facebook accounting for more phishing URLs than the next seven most spoofed brands combined. Block Facebook on your network.

So, what’s the bottom line here? The attacks are coming from everywhere, and your business could be next.

Phishing attacks are like a rising tide, and if you’re not careful, they can quickly sink your business. They target everyone – from tech giants to financial institutions, and even government agencies. The question is – are you prepared?

Take a moment to consider the authenticity of emails. Are they from a trusted source? Do they contain suspicious links? Are they asking for sensitive information?

Make sure your employees are aware of the risks. Encourage them to think twice before clicking on a link or downloading an attachment. After all, a moment’s hesitation could save your business from a devastating cyber attack. [Read more…] about Hackers Don’t Take Holidays – Ransomware Is On The Rise

Ten Awesome Social Media Automation Tools

December 30, 2021

In the last decade, developers from famous social media platforms have changed the way we use their applications. Social media platforms are now excellent tools for marketing products and brands—these platforms act as great sources of exposure for small, medium, and even huge businesses.

Here are 10 of the top Social Media Automation Tools, which you can utilize as the first step towards automating your business.

Workflow
Workflow helps you organize a proper system as needed and share content according to plan. It allows you to promote the right content with the right audience at the right time.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite enables you to keep an eye on your competitors and communicate with your audience and users by creating a community dedicated to your business.

Sendible
You can automate replies to the audience’s queries, collaborate with others, generate valuable reports, and schedule updates with Sendible. This multi-purpose tool will help you organize and plan posts so your marketing team can focus on important tasks and activities.

CoSchedule
This automation tool helps you schedule your posts, thereby saving a lot of time and effort. CoSchedule enables you to schedule up to 60 posts at once.

Chatfuel
Chatfuel enables you to create a chatbot that engages customers and provides accurate responses in real-time to enhance customer satisfaction.

Agorapulse
You can schedule your social media posts and track the performance of your posts to make better decisions. You can engage a larger audience using their informative reports. Their social media management features are amazing.

SEMrush
This all-in-one digital marketing automating tool is the best PPC and SEO toolkit. This tool allows you to automate posts, promote campaigns, track results, and generate valuable analytics.

Tailwind
This scheduling tool also helps with analytics. Tailwind will not only help you automate posts, but it provides posting recommendations so you can reach more potential leads.

Later
With 600,000 happy users, you can already assume this tool’s popularity. This tool allows you to manage your social media comments.

Furthermore, it lets you schedule Instagram posts and increase engagement.

Iconosquare
Iconosquare provides personalized information for social media platforms. This way, your business can progress with social media marketing campaigns using informed decisions. Save time with their in-depth analytics and reporting.

Automating your marketing process and method helps minimize errors and understand customer behavior while saving time, effort, and money. You can even schedule the entire campaign and stay ahead of competitors.

So choose the best social media automating tools from the list above and take the first step to business automation.

Five Social Media Mistakes Businesses Must Avoid

August 22, 2019

Social media is an incredible chance for your brand to interact directly with your audience and grow it even further. If you’re not able to manage your social media marketing properly however, you’ll simply waste time and resources, or worse, actually harm your brand’s reputation.

Here are five key social media marketing mistakes that your business must avoid at all costs:

Discussing Hot-Button Topics
Some topics, especially political and religious ones, are simply not worth bringing up. This is especially true in today’s divisive political environment.

You’ll end up dividing your audience and perhaps even bringing negative attention onto your brand. It’s better to avoid these issues altogether and playing it a bit safer with your choice of topics.

Winging It
Social media marketing is the same as any other digital marketing strategy. You need to know what you want to get from it. If you don’t have specific goals for your social media strategies, you’ll never know exactly what to do or when they’re successful.

Take the time to think about what you really want from each social media platform, and brainstorm about what you must do to get there.

Posting For the Sake of It
Research has found that the number of social media posts you need to be making on a daily and weekly basis is quite frequent in order to truly engage with and grow your audience.

On Twitter, for example, you may need to Tweet up to 15 times per day. However, you cannot forego quality for the sake of quantity.

Treating All Platforms the Same
It’s likely that you have a presence on a wide variety of social media platforms. At the very least, Facebook and Twitter, and then probably a couple out of Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. The problem is when you treat all social media platforms the same. The average audience on Facebook and Twitter are much different. People use Instagram differently than they use Pinterest. If you want to truly thrive on social media, you need to understand each platform and what your audience is looking for on it.

Ignoring Negative Activity
It’s critical that you don’t get defensive on social media, but you cannot simply let negative feedback go unanswered. Not only does it further harm the relationship between you and the individual complaining, but it also adds some legitimacy to the complaint for everybody else to see.

After all, if you had a reasonable response to the complaint, why wouldn’t your company voice it? Make sure that you have dedicated customer service resources handling your social media comments in a professional, expedient manner.

By avoiding the key social media marketing mistakes listed above, your business will be in a great position to not only survive on social media platforms, but thrive on them. Your audience will be engaged and energized, and you’ll reach more people than you ever thought possible!

How To Make Hashtags Work For Social Media

March 3, 2014

tlfheadshot_web — Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

On the list of the great rewards of social networking is its capability to reach a huge crowd while spending minimal costs. Making use of the famous hashtag notation (especially for Twitter and Instagram), you are able to spread your products and services across the globe, and reap the benefits of well-liked trends.

A hashtag must be short and simple to recall
Crafting a hashtag that is too unique or special could be risky. As much as possible, come up with a hashtag that is brief and straightforward so it can easily be remembered.

Long hashtags are at risk of getting misspelled and forgotten. Additionally, with the 140 character limit of every Twitter post, longer hashtags only consume needless space. Simple abbreviations frequently are very effective.

A hashtag must be unique and relevant at the same time
The primary goal of using a hashtag is to bring online users to your social media page.

Picking a general hashtag that may gain large numbers of results will lower the probability of getting your desired volume of traffic.

It may only just make your posts wander off in the search results. You must make sure that your hashtags are only sufficiently unique to be able to avoid too few results.

A hashtag must be searched first prior to using it
Even though you are confident that you have put together the ideal hashtag, it is still crucial to look for that hashtag prior to applying it.

This is the only way to make certain that you will not get classified with any messages that you are not related to. An example of a hashtag disaster was when a certain company used the hashtag “#notguilty” to express how their customers’ felt after eating their product.

However, this Twitter update was published during a popular person’s murder trial. The hashtag #notguilty became a trend, but for an entirely different cause.

Hashtags serve an excellent purpose which improves your chances of reaching a wider audience. Make sure that you know how to utilize them well.

(Image Source: iCLIPART)

Why Social Networking Is Important For Any Business

December 30, 2013

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
If you are not currently using social media for your business then chances are that you have fallen behind your competitors.

Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Google+ are great platforms to promote brand awareness, communicate with existing and potential customers, as well as attract new leads.

Up to a quarter of developed nation’s Internet traffic is used on social media and networks. It is free to sign up and use all of these social networks. Why wouldn’t you want to address this market?

Social media sites can help you establish your online presence. Statistics show that over 70% of people trust ads on social networks from friends, while only 10% of people trust advertisements from websites.

Social media is more than just getting your name out there; it establishes trust and lasting relationships with new and existing clients. You can keep in touch in a personal manner, update services that you offer, and offer discounts and coupons on your social sites.

Social networks work like word-of-mouth, but more reliably. Your friends and followers can easily share your content with as many people as they want without interrupting their daily lives.

This is important because if it is a hassle to view your advertising it could be considered a nuisance instead of a promotion.

Instead everyone will check their social sites and see a post from their friend to check out your business. They are already in the mood for reviewing messages, so this is not an inconvenience to read.

Now before you start making a profile on every social site, first consider what you want to get out of social networking. Most businesses could get a Twitter account to share basically anything instantly.

Twitter is great for marketing and reaching many people instantly. Since Twitter is available easily from any smart phone, it is basically like texting all of your followers at once. Your followers can then retweet or share anything that you post.

Facebook is also very popular. It is a publicly trusted location and it performs really well in Google’s search index. This means that if you are having trouble with getting your website to the top results in Google, Facebook can help. Your company’s Facebook page should not take too long to reach the top results if someone is searching for your business.

Each social network is different and attracts different crowds. This can be seen in the usage statistics for each network. This can help you determine which social networks would be best for you to reach your desired audience.

When starting out you want to start slowly. Do not join every social network you can find. It would be best to join Twitter and Facebook at first. Determine who is going to manage the social sites. Then once you have some followers post some polls or special offers to attract more followers.

Once your followers start posting to your page, read their posts and answer them. This will add a lot of value to your business.

You can begin posting articles related to your business to encourage people to spend more time reading your content. Some things to keep in mind would be to not post too often or you may be considered a spammer.

Once you have become familiar with social networks you can expand to other social networks such as Google+ or Pinterest. The most important rule of all is to be patient; you may not see results overnight. However, if you provide quality content, service, and interactions on your social sites you will be successful.

If you would like help determining where you should start or need any help with your existing social networks, give us a call.