Company Social Media Records Required For Litigation – Are Yours Easily Accessible?

We’ve long been talking about the importance of businesses keeping their own records of the content from their social media profiles. Just last week there was another Facebook outage which serves to remind us all that this information is not evergreen if solely held by third-parties.

The need for archiving social media data is further underlined by the findings of a litigation trends survey conducted earlier this year by Norton Rose Fulbright. The research, undertaken in April 2014, found that 20 percent of the companies surveyed had to preserve or collect data from social media accounts in a dispute or investigation. To put this into context, five years ago that number was almost nonexistent.

While some of the major social networks do offer an export of data, it’s not always in an easily reusable format, nor is it available immediately upon request. As Robin Harris quite rightly stated in his recent ZDNet article – Are you on top of social media data? – the real value in having an archived record of your social media data is in being able to search across that data to find something that may have been said some time ago.

Here at SocialSafe we recognise that finding a particular item or piece of information can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. So that’s why we’ve added extra features such as the Advanced Search and the Calendar to the SocialSafe application, giving you greater control and the ability to search for keywords and phrases with the added granularity of being able to refine your search by network and specific content type, as well as searching within customised date ranges.

We also understand that for a lot of businesses, archiving and record keeping is not something that they’d preferably be allocating too much time and resource to. We’ve tried to make archiving social media content for businesses as easy as possible with the Scheduler, which allows you to back up your content automatically, meaning that you don’t need to think about it until it’s time to find something.

With social media becoming an increasingly significant part of almost every business’ communication and marketing efforts, it’s no surprise that occasionally that content comes under scrutiny. Make sure that you’re able to find and reproduce whatever you need, when you need it, by keeping your own archive of your content with SocialSafe.