ATECH MSP Blog

We live in a moment in time defined by connectivity, which also means we live in a time defined by unwanted correspondence. It’s never been easier to reach you by phone, email, and even social media—even when you don’t want to be reached. Today, we’re talking about how social media, in particular, presents opportunities for scammers to target you and your loved ones.

Look around and you’ll see that almost everyone is scrolling through social media. Whether it’s checking out funny memes, following the latest trends, or staying updated with friends, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X have become part of everyday life. It has also become a very important part of small business marketing efforts. This month, we take a look at how social media is a great and useful tool for small businesses. 

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic nowadays, making data an even more valuable resource. After all, AI platforms rely on data to function.

Due to this, many platforms and services collect data from their users to feed these algorithms. LinkedIn was recently discovered to have started doing so—by default—without informing users or updating its terms of service. 

When businesses start operations, they require a stroke of luck to realize their growth ambitions. With numerous businesses folding shortly after launching, seizing available opportunities becomes critical. In this month’s newsletter, we’ll explore strategies for businesses to better leverage these opportunities.

In both business and personal life, Facebook and other social media platforms have become a pretty fundamental part of how people do things. Not only do we keep in touch with our friends and families, we manage our business’ reputations through these accounts.

Businesses tend to collect and capture consumer data in an effort to provide a better experience or find new customers. Many of these businesses will package this information together and sell it to marketing companies. Consumers often don’t know how to opt out of this kind of activity and, thus, wind up oversharing information. This week, we want to highlight these issues and address how you can keep your personal data from being collected without your consent.

Social media can be difficult to navigate due to how overstimulating it can be. Sometimes it is beneficial to unfollow people or pages that are either no longer relevant to you or are not doing anything for your mental health. To help you detox your social media feed a little bit, let’s discuss how you can unfollow someone on Facebook.

In our last article, we started to tell you about the search engine and outlined Google's complete predominance of the space. This time around, we will take a closer look at a couple of other search engines that you may or may not have heard of, and how they stack up to Google Search.

Google is a tool that everyone uses to varying degrees, but the reality is that Google is but one search engine. There are others out there, and while they perform similar functions, there is a reason why Google is synonymous with web browsing. Let’s take a look at why Google is so popular, as well as how it works to give you the best search results.

Have you ever received an email notification that someone has checked out your LinkedIn profile? While you might be flattered in the moment, you might then suddenly notice that LinkedIn is doing the same thing to you, telling others when you have looked at their profile. While this isn’t always a bad thing, and can even be good for networking, you might want to adjust this setting so that your privacy can be maintained a bit better.

One of the more overlooked parts of cybersecurity attacks involves social media and social engineering tactics targeting it. If you’re not careful, you could be putting yourself at risk of attacks through social media. How can you ensure that your staff members are keeping security at top of mind even when using social media? Let’s find out.

How often do you check social media only to find your news feed clogged with your friends and family sharing the results of quizzes like, “Which Star Wars character are you,” or “What’s your superhero name based on your birthday.” While these quizzes might seem harmless on the surface, they often hide a far more sinister agenda, one which uses the personally identifiable information provided to them for nefarious purposes.

Businesses have always attempted to optimize productivity for their employees in a variety of ways, but there are certain distractions that will always persist–especially in today’s incredibly connected world. One of these distractions is social media, and it creates the illusion of productivity when, in reality, it’s really not helping much.

Social media companies are some of the most powerful entities in today’s world. Their ability to connect people with others of like mind or specific wants and needs often goes overlooked because much of the experience of operating online in today’s climate is adversarial. With the average user spending roughly two hours and 24 minutes per day on social media and messaging apps, companies can use that exposure to promote themselves. Let’s take a look at how small and medium-sized businesses use social media to their advantage.

If you haven’t read part one of our Facebook privacy blog, it wouldn’t hurt for you to go back and read that one first. Today, we will be building off of that blog, teaching people how to properly configure their accounts to give them the best chance to lock down their private information.

Of course, Facebook, being one of the predominant web-based services in the world, has a checkered history when it pertains to individual’s privacy. In fact, I think a fair share of its ongoing troubles when it comes to individual privacy have a lot to do with their overwhelming success.

Social media has taken the world by storm, in no small part because of the videos that people share. We’ve all seen a shared video that we’ve wanted to keep. That’s why this blog will take you through the process of downloading videos from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

When you run a successful business, you accrue a large client base. It eventually becomes impossible to please everyone, leading to some negative online reviews. With the rise of social media making it easier than ever before to take negative thoughts into the public’s view, you need to take a step back and consider your organization’s stance on how it deals with online reputation management.

As per usual in the world of websites and online services, Twitter has updated its privacy policy. However, this comes with the unfortunate side-effect of the web service providing its users’ information to advertisers. While this might sound inconvenient, we’ll walk you through some steps that you can take to enhance your privacy in lieu of this change.

We live in an era where the term “fake news” makes up a significant portion of the headlines. The Internet makes it very easy to misinform others and spread false rumors or news, as you can do so relatively anonymously with little fear of consequence. This has become a problem on social media sites like Facebook, which recently shut down a major “troll farm” in response to continued complaints.

Social media was created with the intent of staying in touch with others, but it comes with nasty repercussions. It comes at significant risk to both your personal and professional security. How can you make sure that your social media usage isn’t putting your organization at risk of compromisation or worse? The first thing that you want to take into account is awareness.