Social media services like Facebook and Twitter have become essential to small businesses as an effective (and free) way to spread information about services and products offered. They are also useful for keeping in touch with customers and clients, letting them know that you care about their thoughts. These sites also make it simpler to conduct business relationships on-the-go, whether on your smartphone or laptop.

However, a recent security threat has been found that can threaten your Facebook profile data and the data of any business page connected to your personal account.
A plugin for Firefox called Firesheep, released late last year, is a hacker’s dream come true. Simply turn the plugin on and your Firefox browser shows anyone’s active logins on any shared wi-fi network. This includes Facebook, according to an article in PCWorld. Thankfully, Facebook has added an extra security feature to help your account stay secure:

“The social-networking site starting Wednesday will let users connect to Facebook using an HTTPS secure Web connection, which offers extra assurance that they’re connecting to the website that they intend to reach, while also encrypting the data sent between the PC and Facebook.”

To enable the HTTPS feature for your account, Facebook is slowly rolling the feature out to all users in their account settings menu under the Account Security tab. Simply check the box asking if you’d like to enable the HTTPS feature. This will ensure that your connection is encrypted and secure.

This is an important story for small business owners who rely on Facebook to connect with customers because it puts your fan base at risk for spamming. More importantly, your business page could be deleted and you may have to start from square one. Although sharing is crucial to success on Facebook, your network security and data protection is absolutely essential to long term viability.