Even if you’re not a high-profile political figure there are three reasons that recent news should get you thinking about archiving your social media.
Brolly team
18 January 2021
Social media posts – and even accounts – can be deleted for all sorts of reasons. Not all of them are to do with political upheaval in other countries.
So even if you’re not a high-profile political figure there are three reasons that recent news should get you thinking about archiving your social media.
The Twitterverse was all a-buzz when the personal Twitter account of the President of the United States of America was suspended on 9 January 2021. Many commentators applauded the move, saying that the account owner’s tweets were dangerous. There were voices (such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel) who didn’t entirely support the suspension, worried about what it signals in relation to freedom of speech.
After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.https://t.co/CBpE1I6j8Y
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 8, 2021
Regardless of what you, or I, or the US President or the Chancellor of Germany might think is right, Twitter is a corporation, with a leadership team that makes decisions based on information to hand in combination with their own company policies and values, and relevant legislation.
What that means for you: If you are an organisation using Twitter to build your brand, market your products, talk to your customers or constituents, your tweets are not really under your control. This isn’t about whether you’re inciting violence, or behaving badly. For most organisations, the risk of having access taken away from you is low. The only question is, “is it a risk you’re prepared to take?” If Twitter deletes an account that’s connected to a Brolly archive, you lose your account, but you don’t lose the conversations you’ve been having.
A suspension of such a high profile Twitter account may have been a surprise. Looking at the conversations that have followed, we should be less surprised if there’s a change in the social media landscape. Apple, Google, Facebook have also chimed into the discussion and made decisions to suspend, delete, remove and other kinds of actions. How will the social media landscape change after this week’s actions? Maybe it won’t, and maybe it will. And if it does change, we won’t know what that change will mean pretty much until it happens. Social media platforms are not known for providing advance notice of updates.
What that means for you: It’s hard enough to keep up with changes like the new Facebook page design, updated post types, image dimensions and more options to learn about (e.g. Quote Tweets, Fleets, Stories… ) without worrying about whether your archive is safe. Your best insurance against these unforeseen changes is to make sure your social media archive is being captured and managed by a platform that specialises in doing just that. Like Brolly, for example.
We all understand the difference between a personal account and a business account. Your business account speaks for your brand, and what gets posted there is probably backed up by a solid social media strategy. In the case of the recently suspended high profile USA-based account, the lines were blurred between personal and politics. That’s a whole other story for a different blog post. The point this raises for us, however, is that your brand’s ‘persona’ is on public display when you Tweet or post. Even if you’re doing a great job of promoting and nurturing your brand on a social media platform, you can’t be sure that others who join the conversation won’t inadvertently or on purpose damage the brand with inappropriate or incorrect content. As we saw in 2019, media organisations can be held accountable for defamatory comments made by others.
What this means for you: Using a social media archiving service like Brolly ensures you can monitor and manage your brand more effectively. With Brolly, you can set alerts so that you receive an email when a keyword appears or even when a known problem-poster makes a comment. And then, if you need to delete the record from public view to protect your brand, you have an archive of it in Brolly. That’s going to be important if you need to go to court, respond to an FOI request or even report internally.
Book a 20 minute call to learn how Brolly provides social media archiving that protects your records, ensures you’re compliant with recordkeeping and data privacy laws and can save your social media and record management teams hours of effort each week.
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This article was written by the team at Brolly. We’re a creative bunch, and we love social media archiving. Like most of the things we do here, this article was crafted with care and attention to detail. If you spot an error, or want to know more, don’t be afraid to reach out and say hello. We’d love to hear from you.
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