How to Guide: Using Your Email Archiver to Archive Social Media Content
In this article we’ll explore how you can use your existing email archiving solution to archive social media content. If you’re reading this post we’re assuming you’re familiar with email archiving, and either have an in-house solution or are using a SaaS solution.
You’re now looking to archive your social media content like Facebook posts, tweets, LinkedIn updates and others. There are solutions available which will archive social media, but why not use a solution built specifically for archiving?
Benefits of Using Existing Archiving Solution
There are several reasons why it might be a better option for you to utilize your existing email archiving solution to archive your social media posts.
- Unified Archive Solution. It takes time, effort and money to keep all business solutions and networks running. One solution will save you time, which is already in short supply.
- Compliance and Regulations. You have already spent time researching and implementing email archiving that satisfies federal, state and industry laws and regulations. If your social media content is archived in the same system than you know that compliance and regulatory requirements are met.
- Record Retention Policy. Your email archiving solution gives you the tools to implement record retention policies. You’ll now have a single place to control the retention of email and social media.
Technical Architecture Social Media Archiving
Now that we covered the reasons and benefits of using the email archiving solution to archive social media content the next question is: How do you do it?
You will either need to develop a service or find a service provider that can capture the post from social media accounts, convert those posts into emails and send them to yous archiving solution.
There are a few options to archive these emails into your existing email archiving solution. Next, we will explore three methods of transporting social media content into the archiving solution.
Option 1: Send posts to your journal mailbox
Your social media content will be emailed directly into a journal account and fetched by the archiving solution.
If your email archiving solution uses the journaling mailbox to fetch email, then this is a better option. It gives you multiple layers of protection. If there is any outage with the archiving solution, then your social media content will stay in the journal mailbox until the outage is fixed.
Option 2: Send posts to a dedicated email account
Your social media content email will go to a dedicated email account. This email will then be journaled and fetched by the archiving solution.
This is an even more resilient option than sending post emails to the journal mailbox. You can create a separate email account and send all your social media content to it. You can then automate the cleanup of this mailbox by placing mailbox quota on the account.
Option 3: Send post emails directly to your email archiver
Your social media content email is sent directly to your email archiving solution.
Most of the archiving solutions have built-in SMTP servers to accept incoming emails. This is a valid option and has resilience built in. The sending services like your email server will try to send the email and if the archiver is not available these emails go into the queue for retrial. Depending upon the configuration and setup of the sending service the queue will keep the emails for hours or days and try to send the email multiple times until it is successful.
Intradyn’s Social Media Archiving Service
We have developed a service which converts social media posts into emails and can be used with any of these three options. This service is called Social Media Archiving Service (SMA Service).
Most of the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn make available APIs for the development of additional services. These APIs can be used to capture and retrieve your social media content. Our Social Media Archiving Service connects to your social media account every few minutes and captures any new content.
Our SMA Service will then convert your social media content into emails. Once a post is converted into an email it can be sent to any email address.
Here is a sample post from the Chicago Cubs Twitter account:
And here is the email for the same post. This post can now be sent to the Chicago Cubs’ email archiving solution and can be archived along side their organization’s emails.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Which email archiving solutions are supported by SMA Service?
Our SMA Service is email archiving solution agnostic. It will work with all email archiving solutions on the market.
2. Does SMA Service work with Microsoft O365 or Google Vault?
Yes, SMA Service will work with Microsoft O365 and Google Vault.
3. What social media platforms can be archived by SMA Service?
We are constantly looking to add new social media platforms. Currently SMA Service can archive the following:
- Flickr
- Tumblr
- Google+
4. We only have Facebook and LinkedIn for our business. Can I just archive these?
Yes. SMA Service is a la carte service. You can select which social media services you need to archive.
5. Can we archive Direct Messages (Twitter) and Private Messages (Facebook)?
Yes, you can archive Direct Messages (Twitter) and Private Messages (Facebook)
6. What is the cost of social media archiving?
Depending on the type and number of accounts, the cost can range from $10-$40 per account / per month.
7. What regulation is this designed to satisfy?
The SMA Service is designed for SEC, FINRA, FDA, FDIC, FTC, FERC, SOX, HIPAA and other regulators.
It’s important to note that a solution in itself does not make you compliant, but gives you the tools to meet regulations. You will have to configure and setup appropriate polices to meet regulation requirements in your industry.
8. Where can I get more information about this service?
Please contact us to learn more.
