Seven weeks ago, vocalist, actor, songwriter, and producer Terry Barber wrote a guest blog (published here) that talked mainly about how his official music page on Facebook had been hacked. While you should go read the whole post that he contributed, the bottom line is that now we’re sitting here at the end of September and he still hasn’t gotten it back. He had well over 14 thousand likes/followers on there, yet has had to start over again and currently has 345. No, I didn’t leave out a digit. Instead of well over 14 thousand he has well over three hundred.
Getting hacked on Facebook is real.
And it’s a shame because, as you’ll hear in the interview that I had done with Terry back in June on Episode 333 of the weekly “Now Hear This Entertainment” podcast, he is extremely talented and doing big things. Yet, scores of people won’t know about all that he’s up to because the method they used for following him is gone.
The day after tomorrow, Episode 347 will come out. As I was preparing for that interview – as I always do with everyone else – I went on the guest’s website and social media (in addition to using notes, talking points, that they send to me). When I was on the website and clicked the Facebook icon, it went to a Facebook page with a message saying, “This page isn’t available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”
I emailed the guest to ask if they were aware of this and the answer I got back was, ‘Yes, long story… it got hacked.’
And if you still aren’t convinced, I also saw a recent post on Instagram by NHTE 236 guest Carly Jo Jackson where she was saying, “My Facebook page was pretty much abducted by aliens for a while ((hacked))…” and then someone in the comments said, “The same thing happened to me!!!”
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Maybe the craziest part of all these music pages on Facebook getting hacked is that obviously everyone is putting a huge priority on that platform, yet with little use for Twitter. As upsetting as it is for me to hear about the former is as frustrating as it is for me to consistently observe the latter.
I look at Twitter accounts that performers have and so (so) many of them are doing very (very) little with them. Their following is poor. The frequency with which they tweet is poor. Some of them pin a tweet and then obviously forget that it’s up there and, as a result, you look at their Twitter feed and it begins with something that they put out more than a year ago. Others haven’t updated their Twitter bio and/or the image header, and you quickly understand that they are only on there to say that they’re on there.
Protect your Facebook account. Change the password if you feel compelled. Make it something tough with weird characters and numbers and symbols. But then safeguard yourself further by placing a priority on Twitter and posting just as regularly on there as you obviously feel moved to do on Facebook. In my opinion, Twitter is a stronger platform than Facebook when it comes to potential discovery by way of hashtags, so even if you only do it for that reason, then good for you. But if your Facebook gets hacked and you’re scrambling for where to redirect people to while your help ticket gets reviewed, know that being regular on Twitter will provide tremendous relief for you then too.
Continue the conversation with me on (yes) Twitter via @NHT_tweets. Alternatively, use Facebook (sigh) or even LinkedIn. Plus, there’s always good old-fashioned email.