In a worldwide population of 7.7 billion, 3.499 billion people are active on social media, which makes social media so much more than only a source of being connected with your near and dear ones. While it is a great means to know what is happening in everyone’s lives, it is also a great place to market your products and services to expand your presence and reach to the target audience. 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels. The popularity that social media has gained has posed a challenge for content managers and SEO marketers to manage multiple social media posts and campaigns.
Social media sites put a lot of restrictions on people who want to promote their products or services. In most cases, you can’t create multiple accounts, and there are even rules against using various tools that help you manage various social media accounts. A solution to this problem is the use of web proxies. Web proxies mask your identity and it becomes easy to dodge these rules and use social media for promotional uses.
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Why do you need a proxy for social media?
For your brand building campaign, you might require multiple social media accounts to show your presence and activity on various social media platforms. If you create social media accounts in bulk from one IP address, those accounts are likely to get banned and that is where the role of proxies is important. When you create each account with a different proxy, the social media service will be looking at multiple accounts created all over the world, meaning that they will not get blocked.
What are the threats of using the same IP addresses to login into multiple Facebook, Twitter or other social media accounts?
- Multiple accounts on the same IP address might get deleted.
- Emails through those social media platforms might reach as “spam”.
- Your ISP (internet service provider) might block you.
Proxy servers as the saviors
Proxies hence have a critical role to prevent such situations. Proxies hide your identity and allow you to create multiple accounts and use all the tools required for marketing without giving away your IP address.
As there are many proxies in the market, and new ones emerge every day; not all of them can be reliable. There are a lot of them that only make money and steal your business and personal information. Redirecting your entire browsing and giving away your passwords to an unreliable proxy server can cause damage to your information and the gadget as well. It is essential that you select a legitimate proxy server cautiously. Check for the following to opt for a good proxy:
- Domain age: check for the age of the domain of the proxy server at whois.domaintools.com; a worldwide database to check domain status. Older the domain and website, better is the proxy server considered. Look for domains that are at least two years old.
- Privacy: a proxy server that is private only to your IP is the best to use. A public proxy is not secure and may cause issues in the future.
- Terms of service: see that the disclaimer and terms of service of the proxy server that you are planning to use are not those that you cannot abide by. Reliable proxy server sites give an easy access to their privacy policies and service terms.
Choosing the best proxy for social media:
There are a lot of factors to consider before choosing the best proxy for social media, but the most crucial one comes in making a decision about public and private proxy servers. The biggest mistake that one can make is using a free or public proxy for social media accounts. Social media networks track users through IP addresses. That means someone using a public proxy could get banned on Facebook or another social media site, and you wouldn’t be able to use the IP address associated if they use VPS as proxy. You will have to find another public proxy and as so many people are using these, you might not find a clear public proxy. There are many other reasons too as to why paid proxies or private proxies are better than free proxies. And this will be a hassle each time you want to login to any of your social media accounts.
There also might be chances that public proxies are owned and run by scammers who are just keeping an eye on your personal data, who set up proxies to breach all your personal information. Imagine your banking data and passwords being leaked on the web. It would cost you a lot more than paying for a private, paid proxy server would.
Public proxies are slow as they share bandwidth with other people, display ads and take forever to connect to social networks. You will never achieve the normal speed and would end up performing poor in your campaigns.
Dedicated proxies are the best suited for social media. There are many more advantages of dedicated proxies that you can read here. You have individual access to your proxy and there will be no worry about anybody else’s behaviour or activity on that proxy. You can visit all your social media accounts without getting affected by anything else.
Advantages of using dedicated proxies:
Dedicated proxies are a boon as compared to any other proxies.
- It provides 100% Anonymity
- It is fast, reliable, effective operation
- It operates fast, reliably and effectively
- It engage in social media sites worldwide
- There are no risks of getting blocked
- Provides flexibility to create multiple accounts for marketing
With dedicated proxies you can comment, post, tweet and get the maximum benefits of social media marketing.
You can’t just go with any paid web proxy, though. You have to be smart when choosing a paid proxy. There are semi-dedicated proxies that can be useful for some online tasks but not for social media. They have shared with two other people and in case other people get into some activities that ban their IP address, you could get banned too and then you have to hunt for a new proxy again. This can be a headache when you have to execute your marketing plans.
The following tips/steps will help select the best proxy for social media.
1. Dedicated proxy for each account:
A proxy is meant to hide your identity. You can use a proxy to run multiple social media accounts. However, one should take care to not put all accounts under one proxy. By doing so, the social network traces all the accounts back to a single IP address and can lead to all accounts getting banned. This problem can be avoided by using a different proxy for all social media networks. There are some tools that let you save your proxy settings so that you can just log in with that proxy every time.
2. Login as per the Proxy Location:
While logging in with different proxies to access your social media accounts, you need to keep track of the location. The proxies that you have purchased can be of various origins. Your proxy provider might give you proxy from Germany, Los Angeles, Hawaii etc. If you log into your Instagram account with a Germany IP address at noon and then a Los Angeles IP address at midnight, it will know that you are goofing up and might lock your account. Pick proxies that are from the same general location or stick to the same proxy each time you log into your social media account.
3. Use a VPS
A virtual private server(VPS) allows you to login with your home computer or mobile and then manage all the resources remotely. A VPS can get more power out of proxies by deploying various bots and tools at once. VPS is a great way to keep work and play separately. For example, when you are using a VPS for your social media management tasks, you can use your own computer for playing games or watching movies. You won’t have to worry about your social media management duties taking up all of your resources.
4. Make Sure Your Proxy Allows Bots and Tools
Even when using social media, everything else should work smooth, isn’t it? If you are using bots and tools, you might waste half the time figuring out how to tweet or post with the bot or the tool along with the web proxy. There are some proxies that unfortunately do not work with bots and tools. Make sure to select proxies that work seamlessly with all bots and tools so that you can work without worrying about anything else.
If you are selecting the bot or tool after selecting the web proxy, check with the bot or tool provider for its compatibility with the web proxy. All of this becomes easy if you choose a company that allows bots and tools for posting and other things on social media.
5. Have Unique Accounts
Web Proxies give you anonymity while using social media accounts. Apart from this, building up your accounts have to be done with intelligence. Create unique information for each account because if you create the same content and information for each account, the social network will realize that you are up to something. Not being able to do so will also ruin your proxy protection.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t go after the same market with your accounts. However, you need to find a way to create unique content. You might post about the same topics, but you need to create unique posts. That way, the networks won’t realize that the same person is creating the posts.
6. Have Separate Proxies for Social Media
Keep dedicated proxies for your social media networks. This will ensure that your tools and bots can access your social media accounts without any hassle. For instance, you might want to cop some sneakers with some proxies. That is a great way to use proxies, but don’t use the same web proxies that you use for your social media accounts. Get separate proxies so you won’t have to worry about a banned proxy slowing you down. It’s easier to keep your accounts separate so you can stay up and running at full force all the time.
7. Don’t Share Your Proxies
Sharing proxies is almost like using semi-dedicated proxies. You might share your proxy with a friend with good intentions, but you would never know what they do to your proxy and you are then banned from your social media network. Sharing proxy means sharing an IP address with other people and being responsible for their actions. It is better to keep your own IP address for social media without sharing.
8. Analyzing Consumer Behaviour
In order to make your marketing programs and promotions a success, analyse your social media visitors to know consumer behaviour. Private proxies play an essential role here as it allows your business to gather social media intelligence and gauge what target demographic users saying about the products or services of a company.
When people are spending 142 minutes a day daily on an average, imagine the popularity and power that social media holds. It is almost a compulsion to use one or the other social media networks to market your product and in a way that it doesn’t even look like marketing!
As Erik Qualman rightly said, “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.”
About the author
Rachael Chapman
A Complete Gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and Love in Writing Techie Blogs.
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