Social media is growing in importance.According to Gartner, Inc. around 20 percent of business users will be usingthe so-called social networking services as their most important communicationtools by 2014. However, at the same time, IT and company managers are expressing growing concerns about security.

Recent studies show that as many as 25% of companies have banned the use of social networks; whereas other sources set this figure as high as nearly 50 percent. Yet security concerns simultaneously limit the enormous potential that social media offers for marketing, sales and corporate communication. Stonesoft Corporation, a provider of integrated network security and business continuity solutions, shares ten tips that help organizations to use social media without compromising security.

Ten tips for the safe use of social media:

1. Increase employee awareness - People can change the way they behave in social networks only if they are aware of the security risks. Therefore, organizations should inform their employees about the risks present in the social media and raise their awareness of the fact that even seemingly harmless information can reveal too much about the company or the person's private life. Providing continuous information about new threats and maintaining rules of conduct can further help with employee awareness. It is helpful to appoint a social media expert within the company who acts as a permanent contact for employees.   
    
2. Establish firm processes - Administrators need to remain up-to-date about the most recent risks on the Web. It is therefore advisable to establish firm processes that are systematically linked to daily workflows. For example, administrators should make sure to download the latest security updates. These seemingly mundane mechanisms enable IT administrators to identify network attacks in time or to avoid them altogether.  
 
3. Maintain a strong set of rules - With in-house guidelines, network administrators can define the network areas and applications that can be accessed by specific people at specific times. This makes it possible to control and monitor access to critical data, and to track such access at any time, which reduces the risk of information falling into wrong hands through unauthorised channels. Companies should also take compliance requirements into account. The important thing is to keep the policies up to date and adapt them to changing circumstances.
 
4. Block infected websites - Someone clicks on an infected website and downloads a Trojan - this can easily happen despite regular employee training. URL filters enable companies to block access to known malware and phishing websites, and this can also be applied to any other suspicious site on the Internet. The filter function is kept continuously up-to-date by maintaining so-called blacklists and whitelists.
 
5. Use next-generation firewalls - Organizations should always keep their security technology up to date. For example, modern firewalls provide a comprehensive analysis of all data traffic. Deep traffic inspection makes it possible to monitor any type of data traffic, from Web browsing and peer-to-peer applications to encrypted data traffic in an SSL tunnel. In a process known as SSL inspection, the firewall decrypts the SSL data stream for inspection and encrypts it again before forwarding the data to the network. This effectively protects workstations, internal networks, hosts and servers against attacks within SSL tunnels.