Stay compliant on social with Hootsuite - for financial services

Social media can play a big role in the financial services industry, connecting you with new prospects, growing brand awareness, and increasing sales. Hootsuite can help you do all of these things, while addressing the unique challenges to using social media in your highly regulated industry.

In financial services, different departments in an organization have different objectives, and all social content has to meet compliance requirements. Financial organizations are also obligated to protect investor and consumer information, and need protocols to head off potential security threats.

Hootsuite helps you mitigate all these risks. By using one controlled platform for all your business’ social media needs, you’ll gain operational efficiency, centralize compliance oversight, and build employee confidence with social media.

Take a closer look at some of the ways Hootsuite can help you remain compliant and secure.

Governance

It’s important to have a social media governance policy that applies to your whole organization. Hootsuite lets you put guardrails in place to help your employees adhere to the policy.

An official policy can help you:

• Maintain your brand identity across social channels.
• Align teams on the regulations of each governing body.
• Prevent a security breach or public relations crisis, and act fast if one does occur.
• Inform your employees of their own social media responsibilities.
• Encourage your employees to own and amplify your brand’s message.
• Give your employees confidence in adopting social media.

Getting all your teams into Hootsuite cuts down on redundant technology and centralizes oversight for all your social business communications. You’ll also be able to unify data from each team that communicates on social. Hootsuite’s ecosystem of partner apps also makes it easy for each department to integrate with systems they already use. Hootsuite provides the following features designed to make your governance efforts easy:

Shared social account access in teams

Invite team members to manage your social accounts without having to share passwords. Learn more about leveraging teams in a Hootsuite organization.

Single sign-on for Hootsuite access

Set up single sign-on (SSO) for Hootsuite logins, so employees can log in with their corporate network credentials. Learn how to set up SSO for your organization.

Custom permissions

Control what each team member can manage with permissions at the organization, team, and social account level. Give analytics access to stakeholders who need oversight, and give publishing permissions to those who create content. Learn about setting Hootsuite permissions.

Approval workflows

Define approval workflows for each of your social accounts. You can assign people or teams to approve new posts, comments, or replies before they get published. You can also add a second or third tier of approvals for extra security. Learn how to set up an approval process.

Compliance

As you know, it’s critical to protect your organization and brand from fines, penalties, or business disruptions. Hootsuite, along with key compliance partners such as Proofpoint, offer solutions that make it easy to maintain a compliant social media presence. Hootsuite and its partners help social media managers in regulated industries comply with with FCA, FFIEC, IIROC, SEC, PCI, AMF, and MiFID II requirements.

Archiving

Financial services organizations must archive all social media activity for at least three years. Hootsuite’s compliance partners like Global Relay offer automated, cloud-based archiving of all types of social posts, securely capturing data regardless of user device. Their unified, searchable databases make the auditing process smoother as well. Ask your customer account manager for more details about archiving solutions.

Content libraries

One way to make sure your teams are publishing content that’s compliant and on-brand is through the use of content libraries. Give each team access to its own library, filled with approved templates, media assets, and ready-to-publish content. To learn more, see Manage your media library.

Curated, compliant content

Amplify is Hootsuite’s brand advocacy and social selling app. It lets your content admins push a steady stream of pre-approved, curated content to the app. From there, advisors can share the content to their own social accounts. Amplify extends your organization’s reach while you keep control over the content your employees are sharing. Learn more about Amplify.

You can segment employees into groups to share different types of content as appropriate. Advisors can also suggest content to the admins as they learn what resonates most with their audience. To help you source enough relevant content for your Amplify program, you can automate content discovery with Curate by UpContent. This integration curates trending articles that match your unique content strategy criteria. It also checks articles against your Proofpoint policies to ensure their compliance.

Proofpoint

Hootsuite partners with Proofpoint to offer several automated compliance workflows that you can leverage. Talk to your customer account manager about which solutions would best support your social program:

Pre-review

Proofpoint Social Patrol creates a prescreening workflow on some or all of your social accounts. Connect your social accounts to both Hootsuite and your Proofpoint Social Patrol account. Then connect Proofpoint to Hootsuite in the Hootsuite organization settings and turn on pre-review on your social accounts. You need to turn on pre-review for each account that you want to watch, including both corporate and advisor accounts. Every post created in Hootsuite passes through a compliance check before it gets scheduled or published. Content is reviewed against policies you establish in Proofpoint. If a post violates any policies, it is sent to the Rejected queue in the Hootsuite content calendar for editing. For more details, see Add publishing security with Proofpoint.

If you have team approval workflows set up in Hootsuite, pre-review is both the first step of an approval workflow and the last step in the approval process before publishing.

Interactive social content, such as comments and replies, are archived and reviewed after they’re published. Social accounts that aren't set up for pre-review are also retroactively scanned for compliance risks.

Preapproved content library templates

Corporate content creators can create templates in Hootsuite and preapprove them in Proofpoint. Create a custom “Content library” policy in your Proofpoint Syndicate account, and then connect Proofpoint to your Hootsuite account in the organization settings. These templates get labeled as “Preapproved content” in the content library. Employees can publish them to their own accounts without triggering policy violations. This is useful for promotional materials, for example, which Proofpoint rejects if an employee creates them.

Real-time predictive compliance

Connect Proofpoint Syndicate to your Hootsuite account in the organization settings. The predictive compliance feature uses an API query endpoint from Proofpoint to screen posts against your compliance policies while they’re being created in Hootsuite.

Combine Amplify for social selling with Hootsuite’s Proofpoint predictive compliance integration. It adds real-time compliance feedback as you create posts to alert and educate advisors on any issues with their content. Advisors can see when a post violates a policy so they can edit it before publishing. If an advisor has pre-review set up on their social account and tries to publish non-compliant content, it is sent to an approval queue first.

Predictive compliance should be used alongside Proofpoint pre-review approval on each social account, and their policies must match.

Security

Using social media brings its own digital security threats to your business and to your customers’ personal data. In financial services, the stakes for malicious activity and social engineering fraud are high. Protect your customers, your branded social accounts, and your executives’ accounts with powerful compliance and security integrations. Learn more about third-party services.

Smart Moderation is a cybersecurity tool that leverages artificial intelligence to scan for threats. It provides real-time monitoring and an automatic moderation service to keep your accounts free from bad content, ads, spam, or trolling activities.

Monitor your brand and competition

Social is a great place to learn about your competition and what's happening in your industry. Social listening allows you to monitor your competitors' strategy, how your products and services are being received and avoid potential crises. Use Hootsuite Insights to monitor online conversations about your brand and your competitors. You can create searches to gather all social mentions that match your queries from a variety of sources including social networks, blogs, and news sites. For more information, see Overview of Insights.

Education

Besides automated technology and centralized oversight, employee education is key to social media compliance. Empower them with the skills and knowledge to be comfortable – and successful – conducting business using social media.

Hootsuite can partner with you to deliver custom training to:

• Familiarize employees with your organization’s social media governance policy. Make sure everyone is clear about what is and isn’t allowed, including which social networks to use and how to use them.
• Educate social account owners on brand guidelines and how each regulation applies to the use of social media in their roles.
• Empower your employees to learn a new set of skills, and gain the confidence to increase their social media activity over time.
• Show employees they’re supported. Strengthen trust within your organization, and the business will earn the dividends.

You can also explore the wealth of online social media courses in Hootsuite Academy. Start with beginner courses on social marketing skills and on how to use Hootsuite.

Advisors who are ready to engage in social selling can take the Social selling for financial services certification course. It covers the major industry regulations and how to use social media to connect with prospects and close more sales for your business. For more details, see the Social selling for financial services curriculum