In today’s world, organizations across the spectrum are actively using social media for branding, customer service, and employee communications, formally constituting these conversations as official business records that must be archived according to multiple laws. While we know that all business documentation must be kept on record for compliance, social media is unlike many other forms of content, posing unique challenges when it comes to archiving. Below are a few of these challenges and some important considerations for effectively archiving your social conversations.
Multifaceted Nature
With a mix of timelines, pages, private messages, images, likes and videos to name a few, recordkeeping is evidently a much more involved task compared to other types of records. Though not recommended as an authenticated form of evidence, if you were to attempt to screen-capture social media pages, you would have to manually expand all comments, video descriptions and likes.
Ever-Evolving Platforms
A common issue with archiving social media content is that these platforms continue to change without any heads-up. Once a method for collecting content is determined, another update, or rise of new social media platform develops. It is challenging to keep up and customize without knowing what’s coming.
Real-Time Activity
The beauty of social media is the speed in which it operates. With content being posted on Twitter every millisecond, archiving technologies need to crawl constantly, capturing the absolute most recent content as it happens.
Deep Linked Content
A good 30% of social media messages contain links to website content on other pages. These links can change easily over time, or, if shortened with a URL shortener, will only be valid for a designated period time before the link expires. These linked web pages themselves can commonly be deleted or changed over time. This makes capturing actual URLs and linked web pages a challenging task.
Integration Requirements
Since simple screenshots won’t suffice in court if you ever needed to prove the accuracy of your business records. Organization’s need the APIs of these networks to be able to integrate with their own applications to gather the information needed. APIs are unique to each network.
Considerations for Choosing an Archiving Solution
Ensure that the solution you choose creates actual archives and not just screenshots. Archives can display social media content exactly as it once was, offering live-replay rather than a screenshot in a moment in time.
An ideal archiving solution not only collects the social media messages, but is also able to look up the original URL and automatically collect the deeplinked web page for later reference.Pick a provider that makes conscious efforts to stay ahead of the trends and offer new developments, new support and new archiving features as social media platforms continue to sprout or change.
Be sure to choose a solution that archives content in real time, so nothing is missed, as opposed to every hour or so.
Make sure you don’t choose a solution that leaves you hanging with half your content. Find out what the provider offers when it comes to collecting content from any third party links posted on social media.Some solutions will open up their APIs to allow their technology to integrate with the technology of partners apps and platforms. The easier the provider makes this task, the higher the quality of the archives will be.
About PageFreezer
PageFreezer is a leading provider of website and social media archiving solutions to a wide range of industries including finance, legal, telecom, retail, utilities, government and post-secondary education. PageFreezer is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) application that enables organizations and corporations of all sizes to permanently preserve their website and social media content in evidentiary quality and then access those archives and replay them as if they were still live. Uses for the archived data range from compliance with regulators such as the SEC, FINRA and the FDA to litigation preparedness, evidence capture, call center support and competitive intelligence.
Find out more at pagefreezer.com
