Does your business have accounts on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook? In a study conducted by HootSuite, 41% of Americans claimed it was important to them that a business they used had a presence on social media. While connecting with the general public via social media can be a good thing, there are a number of compliance issues you should be concerned with.
If your business is based in the financial sector, you have to abide by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules regarding the use of social media. Unfortunately, there are a number of lawsuits each year against institutions in the financial sector. Archiving your social media records can help you greatly if you are involved in a lawsuit regarding a post your company has made.
The growth of social media
With over 2.8 billion people using social media on a regular basis, the power and reach of this forum can no longer be ignored. Business owners realize just how powerful this medium is and are using it to further the reach their company has. In order to avoid legal problems, you need to treat the social posts and interactions your business has like you would physical documents and email records.
Trailblazers in the world of social media archiving, like Erado, work hard to make keeping up with these types of communications easier for business owners. Instead of leaving your company vulnerable due to a lack of preparation, you need to embrace the power of social media archiving software.
Rising to the challenge of internal records management
Keeping track of social media activity is also essential when attempting to address internal issues within your company. If employee misconduct rears its ugly head, you want to have detailed records of what occurred. There have been incidents in the past where CFOs of large financial institutions have tweeted out earning reports before they were formally announced.
Posting earning reports before they are announced is a direct violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Due to social media archiving, companies who had these problems with their CFOs were able to address them before SEC regulators got involved. Detailed social media archiving can help to save you a lot of problems relating to employee misconduct online, which is why it is something you should be passionate about.
Third party social media sites do not archive posts
Some business owners mistakenly think the posts on their social media accounts are automatically archived by the website in question. The fact is that social media sites are essentially third-parties who have no obligation to archive these records. At any time, a social media site can restrict access to past records, which could be disastrous.
Archiving social media posts and interactions on your own is the best way to avoid this type of issue. With your own archive, you can keep this data accessible and safe.
Implementing the use of a social media archiving system is essential for any business owner worried about compliance issues. Luckily, there are a number of software programs out there designed to make archiving social media posts and interactions easy and effective.