Dec 28, 2024
How to Implement Social Media Brand Protection like a Pro in 7 Steps
Social media can be a double-edged sword for businesses. On the one hand, a solid social media presence helps brands connect with customers, boost visibility, and establish authority. On the flip side, social media can also threaten brand reputation, such as:
Fake accounts impersonating the business
Negative comments and online reviews
Viral customer posts and many more
Social Media Brand Protection Strategies addresses these risks by safeguarding a brand's reputation, assets, and customer trust across social media platforms. This article will offer effective, easy-to-implement strategies to help you confidently protect your business on social media.
One valuable tool to help you achieve your goals is Bustem's copycat detection tool. This solution will help you uncover impersonators and fake accounts to facilitate a quick response to uphold your business's reputation and protect your customers.
Table of Content
What Is Social Media Brand Protection?
Social media brand protection involves identifying, monitoring, and safeguarding a brand's digital presence and assets. Scouring websites, mobile applications, social media channels, and digital advertising platforms allows you to keep a pulse on brand perception and any instances of abuse.
A brand protection strategy helps prevent data breaches and copyright and trademark infringement issues. It can stop content abuse, like false reviews or feedback, which can cause brand damage or financial losses. With a practical approach, companies can have peace of mind knowing their name is secure.
The Big Picture of Social Media Brand Threats
More than 4.62 billion people around the world use social media, which makes it a popular way for businesses to talk to their customers. Companies are putting more money into social media than ever before. Because of how popular it is getting, bad actors use these platforms to impersonate your digital products and services.
This costs you money and hurts the reputation of your brand. In 2021, social commerce amounted to $492 billion but is expected to grow to $1.2 trillion by 2025. Currently, Facebook, Pinterest, Google, Snap, and TikTok have ongoing partnerships with Shopify, making it very easy for Shopify merchants to promote their listings on any of these platforms.
Mitigating Social Media Risks for IP Leaders
IP leaders should closely monitor social media, especially if they have a strong platform presence. The first and foremost reason is that there is no other place where your customer base is more exposed. Anyone can go and pull out your followers on your official accounts and send illegitimate listings to them directly.
It’s easier for people to get confused; any fraudster can register a fake account, claim that they are a brand's employee, and promote listings for counterfeit products.
It is the complexity of monitoring. There are channels, groups, profiles, ads, comments, and influencers on social media, and there are only so many places that you need to take care of, making brands more vulnerable on social media than in other areas.
Common Threats to Your Digital Brand
How online criminals can target your brand is varied and multi-faceted, and there are always ingenious new scams that can put your brand at risk. That said, a few common threats are prevalent regarding brand protection.
Online Brand Impersonation
Brand impersonation is one of the most common forms of online threats. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), brand impersonation attacks or scams have grown 85% over the years and routinely cost US businesses billions of dollars in losses. The most common form of brand impersonation is for a scammer to utilize a spoof domain almost identical to your brand's legitimate website or social media channels.
The spoof domain leads consumers to a different site altogether. For example, there are more than 210 known spoof domains for technology giant Apple, which include URLs like apple-accountservice.com or iPhone-applen.com. (Note the "n" typo at the end of iphone-applen.com.)
By adding a dash or making a minute change like a small typo, browsers may type in the wrong address and be subject to phishing scams, potentially hurting Apple's reputation.
Counterfeit Products
If your company creates quality products or trustworthy services, you are at a high risk of counterfeiting. In this scam, criminals simply duplicate the details of your products, selling them cheaper and outside of authorized distribution channels. Counterfeiting costs your company money in sales but also hurts your reputation as the products are often sub-standard.
Cybersquatting and Trademark Squatting
The fundamentals of your business—like your logo, trademark, and company name—are also at risk. For example, in cybersquatting, a malicious party can claim domain names related to your business for destructive purposes or sell them back to you at a heightened cost.
A similar concept occurs in trademark squatting, where bad actors register trademarks of legitimate brands and then force the company to buy the trademark from them.
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7 Social Media Brand Protection Strategies to Safeguard Your Reputation
To protect your brand on social media, start by registering your intellectual property. This step lays the groundwork for developing a strong social media brand protection strategy. Without it, removing infringing posts and accounts becomes an unwinnable war. Brands with a solid IP portfolio can more easily navigate the process of getting rid of counterfeiters on social media.
In addition to registering trademarks, design rights, and other IP domestically, it’s also crucial to ensure additional registration for intellectual property in China. Over 70% of the world’s physical counterfeit goods come from China, and Western companies experience a great deal of trouble enforcing their rights when they’re not registered in the East.
Claim Your Digital Real Estate Before Counterfeiters Do
Start your brand protection strategy by claiming your digital real estate.
Register any domain name(s) you choose, such as YourCompany.com.
Create a range of top-level and similar domains, such as YourCompany.net, YourCompany.us, or YourCompany.biz, to add a further barrier of protection against brand impersonation.
Create and claim brand accounts on all social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Monitor these channels regularly to look for any bogus duplicate accounts.
Control Your Social Media Accounts
Another way to protect your brand on social media is to maintain well-kept, updated profiles of your own. It’s important that you, as the official brand, have a page on all major social media platforms to prevent counterfeiters from impersonating your brand.
If you have a presence on a given platform, then not only will there be a clear comparison between the counterfeiters and the authentic brand, but your page will naturally rise to the top of any searches.
Achieving Authenticity Through Verification
One way to make clear your social media account is authentic is to get a “verified” label on your account. Recognized as the blue tick against your Twitter handle or Instagram name, verification can be achieved through a simple application process; there are no stated minimum follower requirements.
Maintaining Consistent Links Across Platforms
Ensure your page links to all other official pages. This would include links to and from your website/s, between social media platforms, and between all profiles on the same platform if they are separated for language or geographical differences.
Facilitating Easy Access to Authentic Products
Make it easy to shop with your brand, if you have brick-and-mortar stores that sell your products officially, then consider including a map with legitimate stores near any visitors to your page. You want to make it as easy as possible for customers to access your real product, any bump in the road might push customers towards pages selling counterfeits.
Utilize Reporting Tools to Takedown Counterfeit Accounts
All major social media platforms have reporting tools for counterfeits and bad-faith accounts. It’s important to utilize them as they’re the best tools that you have at your disposal to protect your brand on social media. You want to start building trust between your brand and the platform.
Keep the reports you submit as close to 100% accurate as possible – the platform will begin to streamline your reporting process once you’re seen as a credible source of reports, meaning more consistent and speedy compliance with your takedown requests.
Undercover Profiles: A Sneaky Way to Track Down Counterfeiters
Creating accounts on social media is a very simple and fast process. It’s part of why counterfeiters love these platforms so much. But this feature can also become a useful tool in your own social media brand protection and can betray counterfeiters as much as it’s aided them over the past few years.
The Dangers of Infiltrating Counterfeiting Groups
Creating an account can open the doors to secretive counterfeiting groups, allowing you into the circles that are ripping off your brand. Once you’ve gained entry into such groups, you can expect to see an ocean of fake products for sale.
Leveraging Anonymity in the Fight Against Counterfeiting
Products are listed as image posts to the group, links to outside sources selling fake goods are left in comments sections, and many counterfeiters are inclined to send out huge amounts of private messages to members of the group. So, just as anonymity is used by counterfeiters, and often by their customers, the same permission of anonymity can be used in the fight against them.
Automate Brand Protection on Social Media with Technology
Counterfeiters have moved to social media in a big way. The explosion in social media and ecommerce sites has paved the way for counterfeiters to easily steal brand identity elements and use them to disseminate fake wares to unsuspecting consumers across the world.
Leveraging Technology for Proactive IP Protection
The sheer volume of fakes on the market also means that many brands have little to no insights into the number and scale of entities that are damaging their reputation and stealing their sales.
That’s why many brands are streamlining social media brand protection by enforcing their IP rights, using technology-based solutions that rely on artificial intelligence (AI), and detecting potential incidents on behalf of right owners.
Nevertheless, to be effective, the best AI-driven social media protection systems should take a holistic approach to brand protection by consolidating tools and actions on a single platform, providing full visibility on all the different types of infringements negatively impacting a company’s reputation, such as black, gray and white market goods.
Enlist an Expert for Social Media Brand Protection
You may have an exceptional in-house security and IT team in place. Still, regarding digital protection, you need 24/7 monitoring and the most modern and technology advanced resources available to safeguard your company and its reputation.
Consider enlisting the help of online brand protection companies. These expert brand protection solutions can provide advanced monitoring, threat detection, and response strategies to bolster your brand's defenses.
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How Do I Know Social Media Protection Is Working?
Removing counterfeit social media accounts is an encouraging step in protecting your brand from online impostors. Don’t worry that you can’t remove every infringement of your product from social media all at once. Social media brand protection is never an overnight victory. It’s a continuous process of defending against counterfeiters and pirates.
Each counterfeiting account removed should be seen as a step in the right direction. By proving your brand is not one that is easily counterfeited, it can become a significant deterrent for counterfeiters. Make it a headache to knock off your brand, and counterfeiters will start looking for easier targets.
Increased Market Share: The Most Obvious Impact of Brand Protection
One of the clearest impacts of counterfeiting is the effect it has on the sales of brands. With online counterfeiting, it’s easy to mask a fake product as real, and considering the price sensitivity of consumers, offering a cheaper product will massively take away revenue from legitimate companies.
Although the actual percentage can vary depending on the industry, market research suggests that brands can expect that around 5-10% of their customers will have bought a fake at some point.
Dealing with counterfeiting will remove this unfair competition, and will improve revenue for brands. This likely won’t be an overnight victory, but as counterfeits are removed, brands can expect to see their sales figures improve over time.
Improved Search Engine Visibility: A Key Metric of Brand Protection
Social media platforms are enormous and rank very highly for Google searches. A well-run social media page, even if it’s technically an illegal operation, can rank high on results pages if the authentic brand doesn’t put thought into its search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. It’s even possible that a brand that’s poorly managed online gets beaten out on search engine rankings by a well-managed counterfeit account.
Having a potential customer search for your brand, only to find counterfeit pages before the authentic page is disastrous. Monitoring the steady rise of SEO through results rankings of important keywords is a positive way of tracking overall brand improvement. It can be used as a clear way to show how well a strategy works against counterfeits.
Increased Followers and Engagement: A Sure Sign of Social Media Brand Protection Success
As a result of removing impostor social media accounts, you should see an upward trend in your social media followers and interactions with your target audience. This is because you should collect those social media users who erroneously liked or followed impersonating accounts and profiles.
Although unlikely to be an enormous number, brands that clean up their social media usually see an influx of followers in the proceeding weeks.
Find and Take Down Copycats with One-click Today
Infringement on your brand's identity can create confusion with consumers, resulting in damage to your reputation and loss of sales. Bustem helps protect your brand's online reputation by taking down copycat content that can harm your business. Our platform automatically scans billions of websites to identify unauthorized use of your store's content, including:
Images
Videos
Headlines
Text
Once we spot copycats, we streamline the entire takedown process with pre-filled DMCA forms and comprehensive case management. Built by people who know the game inside out, our service offers 24/7 monitoring, instant detection, and bulk takedown capabilities to protect your brand assets.
With over 2M DMCA notices filed daily and businesses losing $29B annually to content theft, we've made protection simple and cost-effective. Whether you're dealing with competitors using your product images, copying your ad content, or stealing your copy, Bustem helps you identify and eliminate copycats efficiently.
Get started with a free scan and see who's been stealing your content. Find and take down copycats with one click today with Bustem.
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