In today’s digital business world, social media has brought huge benefits to the corporates as a branding and marketing tool, but the companies also face numerous risks, ranging from misuse of company resources to conflicts of interest and criticism from others. As a result, companies have now started getting concerned for the same and enforcing social media restrictions at the workplace.

Most of the corporates nowadays are implementing enterprise mobility and as a part of that, provide smartphones and tablets to their employees for work. But, in organisations where there are no strict work policies defined, employees also use the corporate devices for their personal use and often access social media under unrestricted environment. Hence there should be some policies for blocking social media access during work hours.

According to the study done by TeamLease, due to no policies of blocking social media access at the workplace or on corporate devices, around 32% of the total time spend on social media during working hours is personal indicating a huge loss of official resources and productivity. In fact, 13% of the total productivity is lost owing to social media access alone. Further, as per the study, apart from the loss of productivity, due to zero or limited social media restrictions, it has resulted in an increase in loss of confidential information, defamation, misinformation, and employee solicitation. Thus, it becomes extremely critical to block social media access at the workplace and from the corporate-owned devices.

A detailed drill down on the nature of usage and time spend, according to the report, Facebook is the most visited social media platform. Out of the 62% of employees who accessed social media during working hours, nearly 83% of them spend significant time browsing Facebook.

Summarising major risks that a company may face with employees’ use of social media on corporate devices

• Misuse of Work Time
• Misuse of Company Resources
• A risk to Company Network or Data
• Disclosure of Confidential or Other Non-Public Information

Using a company-owned smartphone to access social media, has a risk of excessive data use, or access to inappropriate social media websites and/or apps which poses the risk of introducing possible malicious software or other rogue applications, especially which involves downloading files. Hence, besides having effective social media ethics and compliance initiatives, there must be proper device management solutions like Knox Manage for all the corporate-owned mobile devices. Knox Manage can restrict social media apps and whitelist the websites on all the registered devices. Hence, employees cannot access those apps on the corporate devices and as a result, it avoids productivity & data loss and gets control over data costs. It can also remotely monitor the registered devices from the single web-based dashboard and IT admin can get the real-time status of each of these devices.

Thus, in order to keep a tab on the social media activities by their employees or to completely restricting or blocking the social media access, they require Mobile Device Management solution which can lock their devices for the work purpose only.