Hello!

Thank you so much for reaching out! I absolutely understand your concerns about your privacy and the additional pressures of your own name being your brand. It can certainly be an intimidating process from the outside looking in, but there are tons of ways to safely be a part of social media and gain the valuable customer interactions that you desire. 

My absolute favorite part of using social media as a marketing tool is that it is a creative process! The process stretches from the types of content that we are posting to the marketing strategy that we use to reach specific demographics of users. You’ve voiced concerns about having your own pictures and videos posted on socials, but that is not a requirement of these platforms. We can always find/create other forms of content to communicate the type of messaging you want to your audience. 

I want to stress that what makes you comfortable is most important. However, I do want to dive a little further into what it means for your privacy to post your own pictures and videos on social media. Although intimidating, it can be a super strong way to connect with old, new, and future customers! Being able to see the person or people behind a business can add a bonding layer between the business and the customer on a scale that can not be achieved elsewhere. 

First and foremost, you should understand that privacy and data security are actually a major concern for social media companies and they go to great lengths to protect individuals’ information. Each platform we intend to use has extensive information online about what data they collect and how you are protected. One common example of a privacy violation would be an account impersonating or claiming to be yours. This is strongly against the policy of any platform, and reporting the fake account would result in that account being banned. In addition, you would be able to communicate to your followers that this is happening and to be aware of the issue. Occurrences like this happen all the time and cause no future privacy concerns once the false account is banned. The platforms can even do things like ban specific IPs, so if someone makes a fake account that gets banned and then tries to make a new one with the same intent, the platform will recognize their IP and not allow another account to be created. 

The number one fear that I’ve encountered about posting yourself on social media is the fear of negative reactions. The good news is we can control not only who we are sharing our content with, but also how those viewers can respond. We can hide the like count and limit or delete comments. Along with that, we have full control over what gets posted, so we can edit out or blur any private information that may appear. One step I may recommend to becoming more comfortable with these platforms is starting with a private account and only allowing trusted customers to follow you. This way you know exactly who is seeing your posts and can trust that they have your best interests in mind while you become more comfortable with the platform.

There truly are tons of possibilities with what we can do on these platforms and how we can manage your privacy. As I stated before, making sure you are comfortable on these platforms is of the utmost importance and I am happy to answer any more specific questions you may have!

Thank you!

Drew Sokolowski