The Irresistible Allure of Social Networking Platforms
In today's digital age, the financial sector is increasingly adopting the Bring Your Own Persona (BYOP) approach, utilising personal networks and social media platforms for business promotion. This strategy, which has key drivers such as tapping into an employee's personal network, creating more personal customer experiences, optimising marketing efforts, and maintaining a consistent presence on familiar platforms, offers a balance of moderate financial investment and high potential returns in brand awareness, lead generation, and sales growth.
However, with this approach comes risks. Wasted budget, reputational damage, and data privacy issues can be effectively minimised by developing a solid social media strategy, using professional management services, setting clear tracking and analytics for ongoing performance measurement, and implementing crisis management plans for high-visibility situations.
Compliance plays a crucial role in this landscape. The compliance team is responsible for capturing, archiving, and actively supervising inbound and outbound content. International consumer data privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), add to the complexity and scope of the legal team's responsibilities.
The C-suite should take notice of the increase in fines and suspensions in the financial sector due to social media-related issues. Successful adoption of BYOP requires open cooperation between IT, legal, marketing, and regulatory teams. IT is responsible for making sure the systems and software are in place to properly execute and automate compliance-driven processes.
Marketing acts as the social media epicentre, responsible for curating and generating relevant content, responding to incoming messages, and aligning with company campaigns and newsworthy events. Determining which stakeholders in the organisation have a business need for BYOP is an essential first step in establishing a company-wide social media strategy.
Automating the process of checking all social media communications against established policies for approved use is critical to mitigating risks while empowering the right balance of speed, agility, and reach. Advanced archiving technology can play a major role in automating the management of BYOP and ensuring the completeness of the supervision to mitigate risk and maintain compliance.
Establishing the right set of policies for BYOP is the single biggest factor in making it successful. Creating policies for the allowed use of approved social media channels is crucial, with the compliance team and key users collaborating to establish rules for content dissemination and access. The collaboration team can double as a cross-department training team to explain the benefits of social media, risks and risk management procedures, organisational position and strategy, internal and external use, rules of engagement, and the needs and roles of stakeholder groups.
The Big 3 social media platforms most financial services organisations start with are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, with LinkedIn being the most popular due to its professionally oriented attributes. The concept of BYOP is important in the adoption of personal social media applications and networks for business communication. Social media activities fall under the compliance umbrella in the financial sector. Pre-approval versus active monitoring of social media communications is a major topic of debate, with archiving technology inspecting all social communications and flagging any messages or content that needs to be reviewed for potential violations.
Collaboration among all stakeholder groups can inform the creation of a comprehensive and robust social media strategy and policy. By working together, the financial sector can harness the power of BYOP while minimising risks and maximising returns.
