According to a recent study conducted by the Brunswick Group, when making decisions about financial service providers, consumers and investors are relying less on traditional media, and more on what they discover on social media.

In addition, investors aren’t just visiting social networking sites to passively consume information. The Brunswick study reveals that social networks continue to increase year-to-year, with popular sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook considered a few of the most valuable sources of information for investors. Also, for the first time, presentation sharing (33%) and video (23%) appear in the survey as resources for investigating an issue.

Once you’ve created your social media strategy and developed policies to support social use at your firm, it’s time to start thinking about how to successfully enforce those policies. Without the right technology to help enforce your firm’s social media policies, it’s almost impossible to keep up with the number of social media posts, tweets, and conversations that take place every day. The good news is there are technology solutions that can help you reach your business goals while maintaining compliance.

In November, Smarsh teamed up with Hootsuite to help Hootsuite customers manage the supervision, discovery, and production of published social media content. Now, these customers can use The Archiving Platform™ from Smarsh to retain and supervise all of their social content. The Archiving Platform supports traditional communication channels such as email, and also a broad range of popular social channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest and others.

Smarsh and Hootsuite recently released a new white paper “Key Components of a Successful and Compliant Social Media Strategy,” which will help organizations understand how they can satisfy the retention and retrieval requirements for electronic communications.

Safe, secure and automated capture of social media communication records is the goal. Some archiving features can make the difference between a compliance team that’s overwhelmed by social media, and one that supports social media use because they have an effective way to manage and supervise the content.