5 Common Social Media Compliance Pitfalls
Engaging the customer is a vital part your business and social media allows your company to reach the consumer in a direct and personal way. While there are key advantages to using social media, like generating low-cost leads, receiving important feedback from your audience and reaching potential customers, there are also pitfalls when your social media compliance is an afterthought.
Pitfall #1: Ignoring regulatory oversight
According to regulators, social media is defined as “a public communication channel subject to existing earnings disclosure, truth in advertising, and data privacy regulations.” So much like other communications, social media is subject to the same rules that protect consumers against fraudulent advertising and claims.
Governing bodies in the U.S., such as:
- Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA),
- Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC),
- Federal Trade Commission (FTC),
- The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC),
- Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
- American Bankers Association (ABA),
and various other local, state and federal agencies, impose rigorous guidelines for the social media activity of all business. Regulated businesses generally have strict directives when it comes to recordkeeping, supervision, suitable language and content while government agencies must comply with open records requirements.
Pitfall#2 : Ignoring regulatory requirements
When it comes to social media, it’s not surprising that regulated industries and governmental agencies face more challenges. Some of the pitfalls regulated businesses face are due to a lack of documentation and supervision as well as mandated content requirements.
In the case of the financial industry, which sees the most incidents of social media compliance issues, businesses are required by FINRA, SEC, FTC, FFIEC, and ABA to maintain all posts for three years, content must be reviewed and approved by a principal in the business and the content of each post must adhere to industry standards.
Regulated businesses need to routinely monitor the content in all social media posts and be prepared for audits by one or several agencies. These regulations make it necessary for you to archive each of your social media posts for the past three years.
Pitfall #3: Ignoring your brand message and reputation
A seemingly innocuous post, by a well-intentioned employee, can weaken your brand or divulge a trade secret. While the dialogue tends to be more casual on social media, it is critical to keep your messaging consistent, while reflecting your corporate identity, values and mission. Also, avoid posts that may unintentionally disclose proprietary, copyrighted and confidential materials.
By limiting access to who can post on your site, you will ensure that your brand and your messaging are targeted to the right audience while decreasing the risk of exposing confidential information. Create an approval process and assign key personnel to create, approve and post messaging.
Pitfall #4: Ignoring response time
Monitoring posts, comments and third-party interactions on your social media page is vital for every company. Hackers, trolls and disgruntled customers can post to your page at any time. Moreover, unauthorized, fraudulent and protest accounts plague branded companies and can cause security issues and customer complaints that can affect your business.
By reviewing comments and posts to your page in real time, you have the ability to block negative commenters and third party links as they are posted to your page. Also, monitor your page for increased activity. Typically, when unauthorized, fraudulent and protest accounts are created, you will see a spike in activity on your branded page.
Pitfall #5: Ignoring scale and network capabilities
Considering the vast amount of people adopting social media, along with all the regulatory constraints, can tax your business’s network capabilities. Scaling your company’s infrastructure to handle the increased workload is mission critical.
It is imperative that your network provides the capacity to access your social media posts in real time and increased storage for archived posts.
Avoiding pitfalls while increasing efficiency
Intradyn Social Media Archiving can help your business avoid these pitfalls. Our proven and effective solution will provide the peace of mind by ensuring your social media posts meet compliance standards with all state, federal and industry regulations. With your social media policy and our technology, social media compliance is easy and inexpensive. Benefits of our Social Media Archiver include:
User friendly
Access all of your social media accounts on one platform through our user-friendly interface provides a real-view look and feel of a social media account with a scroll through past activity timeline, graphs and charts. You don’t have to be an analyst or developer to use Intradyn Social Media Archiving.
Achieve regulatory compliance
You will be audit ready while complying with FINRA, SEC, FTC and other industry regulations. All your social media posts will be automatically archived daily with the date and number of posts and securely stored on our private SaaS cloud platform in accordance with rigorous SSAE 16 auditing standards with redundancy for added precaution.
All posts, tweets, DM’s, messages, pages, and blogs are 256-bit digitally signed and atomic-clock time-stamped to meet data integrity and authenticity requirements set forth by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).
Our search features allow you to simplify the audit process and streamline preparation for eDiscovery and litigation by searching posts using keywords and filters and full text. Once you have created your report, you can export your social media data to any spreadsheet.
Review your posts in real time
Social Media Archiving uses the Twitter and Facebook APIs to gather data in near real-time, providing the most comprehensive capture of social media content in the industry. Near real-time capturing also allows you to delete and block any inappropriate messaging immediately.
You will have a complete record of your social media communications, even if content is taken down or deleted. Our solution will maintain an automatic record of all content.
Scale your capabilities
Most importantly, as you grow, you our solution grows with you. Our cloud-based solution and subscription offerings allow you to add storage and functionality that will help you comply with regulatory restrictions while improving workflow and your brand integrity.
