The modern age brought us greater possibilities of promoting one's brand in social media and building a strong Internet presence, yet it also made us more exposed not only to the targeted audience and potential customers, but also to those who may want to harm your brand and compromise its performance in the Internet.

It may strike out of the blue - you finish a successful working day, and then suddenly you are overwhelmed by a ton of mentions or Facebook notices from your audience with the negative feedback to the last posts of yours.

Surprised, you check your news feed and realize there are lots of offensive things posted from your brand's name - and you realize your account has been hacked.

The reputational damage from such a scheme could be enormous. You will have to spend lots of money trying to rebuild what had been destroyed: reputation is easy to lose, but incredibly hard to rebuild.

Which is why the best way to restore your reputation is, in fact, not to lose it. We've prepared a list of tips that will help you protect yourself from the ill intentions of hackers and dirty competitors of all sorts.

Just take a peek at these simple yet effective ways of ensuring your Internet safety:

1. Virtual private network is a must

Since to promote your brand and build a sufficient you have to be very active on social media. You will have to do tons of retweets, mentions, reposts etc. And the vital task for you is preventing hackers form laying their hands on your password and access codes, because sometimes the networks you log into your accounts fro, cannot be considered safe.

To achieve a desired level of safety your brand will need a VPN, which stands for virtual private network.

VPN encrypts your computer's or laptop's connection and then reroutes it via an offsite server that is 100% secure.

This way you won't have to worry about somebody stealing your pass codes.

2. Be aware of Phishing attempts

The most basic of the tricks that hackers use to gain access to other people's accounts is called phishing. Hacker, posing as someone with a reputation - your bank, attorney or whatsoever - tries to get you tell him your confidential data, among which are also your passwords and other access codes.

Be careful when opening links you have received in the comments or messages if you cannot see what's there. It could be a page created by hackers to retrieve your data and use them to harm your brand's reputation.

3. Enable all the alerts

To prevent the suspicious activities at the very beginning, you need to set the alerts and constantly monitor your account, activities and entries.

It can be done via the system that will detect the intrusions and will alert you every time someone is trying to log in into your account from an unauthorized device or using a suspicious IP.

4. Connect your accounts to your mobile number

Even the strongest passwords cannot guarantee you 100% protection from the skilled yet malicious hackers.

This is where the two-factor authorization comes in. Connect your accounts to your mobile device so that no one can access them even knowing the right login and password, without your approval.

The problem with the two-factor authentification is the one account - one number rule which can turn the authorization process into a real pain for your marketing team. However, there are plenty of online tools that can help you solve this problem.

5. Install a password manager

Since a successful brand needs to be present on all the social media platforms that matter - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google plus, YouTube, that means you are going to need more than one password. Also, probably more than five or even ten.

You cannot use one password or even similar password for each and every of those accounts - it makes you too exposed, and that's your brand reputation at stake here. You cannot risk your accounts being hacked.

There are plenty of online tools that will help you manage your passwords by keeping them safe on the encrypted server.

You can use these tools no matter what OS you're on - Android, iOS, Mac OS and Windows.

Social media offer great possibilities but also create new risks. In order to be safe, you need to be smart. And with our tips that shouldn't be a problem.

Use these tips while building your Internet presence and be safe!