Social media platforms are essential for communication and information sharing. Use these platforms to connect with your target audience, build brand awareness, and attract ideal clients. But many firms have not fully embraced social media marketing due to the challenges of staying compliant with industry regulations.
Since you handle sensitive financial information and provide essential guidance, you need to consider additional factors compared to businesses in unregulated sectors. If these concerns make you hesitant to engage in social media marketing, you will miss out on valuable opportunities for business growth.
To appropriately use social media, recognizing the extra steps required. One key difference for financial advisors is social media archiving. This involves maintaining a record of your company's social media content, communications, and relevant metadata.
Why is social media archiving important?
Social media is an indispensable communication tool for businesses, but creates compliance, security, and privacy challenges. Proper archiving of social media data is crucial to meet compliance requirements and reduce these risks, ensuring your firm has a backup of content in case of complaints. Let's explore this further.
Compliance Regulations
Financial advisory firms must adhere to strict compliance regulations regarding retaining and archiving communications and records, including social media content. These rules ensure that firms maintain ethical standards and transparency when interacting with clients.
Archiving social media posts is as important as archiving other forms of communication, such as website content, emails, and text messages. The SEC mandates that firms document all forms of advertising, including social media posts. Not archiving social media content could result in a violation of recordkeeping requirements.
The SEC introduced a new Investment Advisor Marketing Rule in December 2020, which took effect in May 2021. This rule allows financial advisors to use testimonials in their marketing, meaning financial advisory firms must now archive any testimonials shared on social media platforms, such as Google Reviews, Yelp, and others.
Failure to comply with these regulations can result in serious consequences, including fines and legal action.
Creating and Managing Your Firm's Social Media Archive
Manually archiving social media content can be a daunting and error-prone task. But an automated archiving tool can simplify this process, significantly reducing the time investment and ensuring all relevant content is accurately captured and stored. With automation, advisors can be confident that they won't miss any crucial information and can focus on other important tasks.
When selecting a social media archiving tool, consider factors such as platform support, regulatory compliance, search capabilities, scalability, cost, and data ownership. Here are a few options to consider:
Smarsh
Smarsh is a comprehensive platform that includes social media archiving for popular platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. It captures all social media content in real-time and stores it in a secure, tamper-proof archive.
This tool is designed to meet compliance and regulatory requirements, making it a great option for businesses that need to ensure they are following the rules. Smarsh's user-friendly interface makes it easy for businesses to search and retrieve archived content, and it also includes features like monitoring and supervision to help ensure that businesses are keeping up with their obligations.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform with archiving capabilities for compliance purposes. It captures social media content in real-time and stores it in a secure, searchable archive.
Hootsuite is well-known for its social media management capabilities, and its archiving functionality is a useful addition for businesses that need to meet compliance requirements. The tool gives businesses complete control over what content is captured and how it is stored, with options for customizing retention policies and setting up automated alerts for potential compliance violations.
Erado
Erado is a 20-year-old social media compliance archiving company that provides solutions for regulated industries to leverage social media tools while staying compliant with FINRA, SEC, FCA, and other regulatory, legal, and e-discovery obligations. It was the first vendor to capture, archive, and supervise all of the leading personal, professional, and corporate social media sites and has been recognized by Gartner and Forrester for its leadership in this arena.
Erado offers a fully integrated platform, supervision, reporting apps, and 24/7 customer support with a commitment to long-term customer satisfaction.
Whichever archiving tool you choose should support the specific social media platforms you need to archive and comply with FINRA, SEC, and FCA regulations. Look for a tool with robust search capabilities that can handle the volume of data you need to archive, fits within your budget, and allows you to retain ownership and control of your data.
Manual Archiving
If you can't use a tool, it's still possible to manually create a social media archive by following a systematic approach.
Make a list of all relevant accounts. Create a system for capturing content, such as taking screenshots, saving web pages, and generating PDF documents. Be consistent and ensure all content is accurately captured. Organizing the archive, for example, by platform or date range, will make it easier to navigate later. Securely store and backup the archive to prevent data loss.
Though manual archiving can be time-intensive, it offers control and customization that automated tools might not provide.
Compliance and Success Go Hand in Hand
Social media has become a crucial tool for financial advisors to connect with and engage their target audience. But due to the sensitive nature of financial information and regulatory compliance requirements, firms must take extra precautions to protect themselves and their clients. That's where social media archiving comes in.
By maintaining a comprehensive record of your company's social media content and communication, you can meet compliance requirements and safeguard your firm against infractions. Social media archiving preserves the past while paving the way for a successful future in social media marketing. Take the necessary steps to protect your business, and don't let compliance worries prevent you from using these powerful tools to grow your business.
