For those involved in Internet marketing or who are building a major presence online, it can be devastating for another person to open a social marketing account with your screen name. It’s a great idea for webmasters to have a presence on every social networking website. If your online identity is JoeSchmo, someone could open a Twitter account with the screen name of Joe Schmo and hurt your online socializing and even kill your website traffic. If the person who owns JoeSchmo on Twitter says some really mean stuff to people, it won’t drive people from just him, it’ll drive people away from you. People will naturally associate you with him, which can really hurt your efforts. Now, let’s say that JoeSchmo on Twitter is your competition! Instead of people going to you, they’ll go to your competition. This can build him up and eventually tear you down. I personally know of a few cases where social networking identity theft has happened and I feel bad for the person whose identity was stolen. The worst thing about it is that social networking identity theft is completely legal, so once your name is taken by someone, they have the right to keep it, that’s why you need to protect your social media identity!
Since there are around 150 social media sites, it can be a huge waste of time signing up for all of them. Signing up to each site will take approximately 5 minutes. If that number is multiplied by 150 sites, well… it’ll take a really long time! There are many programs that will fill out the information and join for you, but often they put the wrong information in the wrong fields. This will give you a presence on these social networking websites, but can also make you look like an idiot. Also, these tools may actually just scour these sites for your presence and open accounts in your name, but for themselves and not you.
With online name branding and social networking becoming more and more important, it’s a great idea to get what is called social networking identity protection. I stumbled upon a website the other day that really does the job. After ordering Social Media Identity Protection, real people got to work in getting my name up on 150 social networking websites. Not only did this get my presence all over the internet, but it brought me a little bit of traffic from each social networking site.
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