How to Prevent Your Instagram Account from Being Hacked

Many business owners, especially those whose niche is either fashion, food, or fitness, rely on social networks, like Instagram or Pinterest, for advertising purposes. If you are still a novice and have a small base of followers, a hacked account will be bothersome, but not a major setback. Additionally, if the account is not that popular, no one will most likely bother to hack it. However, if you have generated a substantial online crowd of devoted followers than you should consider some extra security measures.

Protecting your social media accounts should be one of your priorities, since being a victim of account theft can strike a major blow to your future plans. Someone can steal your pictures and photoshop them thus harming your reputation, someone can steal your identity or even your audience. Here is one instance, a recent event when two sisters lost a lot of online authority as well as their Instagram account.

A cautionary tale

Base Body Babes is a brand created by two sisters from Australia, Felicia Oreb and Diana Johnson, and it was one of the more renowned brand names on Instagram. They had approximately 560,000 followers, but during one weekend, things drastically changed for these two fitness instructors.

Felicia Oreb decided to check the account one day, when she noticed that she has been logged out. After numerous attempts to log in, she realized that her password was changed, so she used her husband’s phone to check the account immediately. She witnessed pictures disappearing in front of her eyes, and it wasn’t long before they were all gone, and the whole account name was changed to finesfitnessgoals. Luckily, the followers unsubscribed so at least the hacker could not gain anything from this theft.

All the sisters could do is ask for the account to be retrieved, but since no followers, nor pictures were present, they decided to make a new one. Over the course of 24 hours they managed to generate around 40,000 followers, which is indeed impressive, but still nowhere near their prior number. They have started an online campaign #bringbackbasebodybabes, and the engagement and response was indeed amazing. The identity of the hacker is still a mystery, but it is most likely someone who wanted to obtain a great number of followers easily.

In other words, do not allow yourself to get into such a situation, there are numerous ways to increase the security level of your account, and protect your content.

Best practices of how to prevent your Instagram account from being hacked

Let’s go over some basic techniques that can keep your account well secured.

• You should use a strong password for starters, and it should be something you can easily remember, for example, take some personal event like “I visited the colosseum last year when I was in Rome” then your password should be (IVTCLYWIWIR) and of course add a number or a whole sequence of them.
• Password manager is another useful application that can generate passwords for you, and you will always have a tool that reminds you what your new password is.
• Take extra precautions for securing your primary e-mail. If one is to log in, he or she should need to type an answer to a personal question to gain access to your e-mail.
• Block all the suspicious followers.
• Keep the circle of trust as narrow as possible, if you have a shared account.
• Turn off the feature that reveals your location.
• Keep all the relevant information, like address, birthday, phone number, or employment details, private, the less people know about you the better, they will be less likely to gain access to your important data.
• Deny apps that want access to Instagram.

You can also add your Instagram URL to your followus.com page and promote your followus.com page to your followers across all your social networks. If a hacker ever does gain access to your Instagram (or other social network) account, simply change your Instagram URL on your followus.com page to point to your new Instagram account. That way, all your fans and customers will still be able to find you on social media. Moreover, you can contact followus.com’s phone support if any unforeseen problems occur, and our support team will be happy to help you resolve these issues.