In 2016, President Trump’s campaign was able to utilize a swath of personal information from people all over the world to target them with campaign ads. How did they get this information? From Facebook. A private data firm called Cambridge Analytica was able to use private information from the popular social media network to mine for the data that the presidential campaign team needed to build a very successful digital marketing campaign.

This may seem harmless at first glance, but the fact that private data, supposedly protected by Facebook, was able to be mined for any purpose, has made many people hesitant to post anymore, or to use the website for social media marketing. Before you delete your Facebook account, here are a few tips for making your Facebook account safer.

Step One: Optimizing Facebook’s Privacy Options

If you are familiar with Facebook at all, you probably already know how to change your Facebook privacy settings so that only your friends and family can see your posts, your photos, or other information about you. But there are advanced privacy options that can help your profile stay safe as well. For example:

• You can review any posts or photos that others have tagged you in, and remove that tag if you prefer your name not be associated with the post or photo.
• If you click on “More” under Photos, Likes, and Comments in the privacy settings, you can also determine who can see the friends you’ve added, any public events you’ve attended, the videos you’ve watched, and so on. You can allow friends to look at these things, or lock them from everyone.

Be sure to go through the Facebook privacy settings very carefully to see what you can make more secure.

Step Two: What Information Should You Never Post?

The next step to using Facebook safely is to ensure that you are only posting things that you are comfortable with the public knowing. Even if you do have your privacy settings on, keep in mind that any friends or people you’ve allowed to see your information could always screenshot it, and data mining companies like the one mentioned above can clearly do far more than many of us realize. Don’t post anything like your address, your phone number, your full birthday, or anything else that could be used to steal your identity.

Step Three: Remove Third-Party App Access

The last tip we have for you is to remove any third-party apps from accessing your Facebook account. You can find out which apps you’ve allowed access to in the Settings of your account. This could be a door for hackers to get to your personal information.

Staying Safe on Facebook

At Organically, we believe that social media marketing is a powerful tool, and don’t encourage you to leave it behind over security risks. Instead, it’s time for us all to get smarter about how we use these platforms. Keep your personal information safe by using Facebook wisely, and you’ll still get to reap all the benefits of digital marketing with this great platform.