Social Media for Business is Rising, but Many are at Risk without a Compliance Solution

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Written by: Smarsh

While email is still the largest component of electronic communications today, organizations are steadily increasing their use of social media. However, when it comes to compliance and having an effective solution in place for supervising social media communications, a gap still exists.

Response data from the Smarsh Electronic Communications Compliance Survey Report indicates that, since 2011, organizations have significantly increased the allowed usage of social media channels in regulated industries. LinkedIn has gone from 39% in 2011 to 72% in 2015 (up 33 percentage points, nearly double), Twitter from 14% to 44% (up 30 percentage points, more than tripled) and Facebook from 23% to 34% (up 11 percentage points, but relatively modest growth by comparison). The survey response data also indicates that only 39% of respondents, who allow the use of social media channels, have a solution in place for archiving/supervising the social media content.

COMPLIANCE POSITION ON SOCIAL MEDIA IS EVOLVING

Today, compliance professionals are more open to the use of corporate communication across social networks. While the shift didn’t happen overnight, feedback in the Smarsh survey shows that compliance officers are moving away from fearing the potential threat of the use of digital channels. Since the inception of this survey in 2011, compliance officers have been steadily moving from prohibition to permission. Leading firms are instituting policies to govern usage of these channels, enabling usage for business communications, and implementing retention and oversight systems to maintain compliance.

A GAP REMAINS

In 2011, only 17 percent of firms archived at least one of the three popular channels made up of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The next year, this grew to an average of 30 percent and now in 2015 it’s at 61 percent. While the growth in policy and enforcement technology with leading firms is trending in the right direction, a compliance gap still remains. The remaining 39 percent of respondents that allow social channels do not have an archiving/supervision solution in place for social media content. A lack of awareness that a solution exists for social media content could be a contributing factor to this situation.

WHAT DO THESE NUMBERS TELL US?

Smarsh believes that this data highlights three key points:

  • The use of social media for business communications is on the rise — even in regulated industries.
  • The adoption of business-oriented social media (LinkedIn and Twitter) is growing MUCH faster than personal focused channels (Facebook).
  • Due to not having an archiving/supervision solution in place, a significant amount (39%) of organizations allowing the use of social media in regulated industries are still at risk of being non-compliant.

    • HOW SMARSH CLOSES THE GAP

    Customers who deploy The Archiving Platform by Smarsh can mitigate potential compliance risks for all their electronic communications, including: content for social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others.

    The Archiving Platform is a leading cloud-based comprehensive archiving platform supporting a broad range of social media content types plus email, instant and text messages, web and video. Unlike email-centric archiving products, the search-ready social media content retained in The Archiving Platform is stored in proper context and not flattened into a generic email format. This differentiating quality enables the advanced and intuitive supervision/review and search/discovery functionality that leading firms are succeeding with.