Actiance Adds Functionality to Social Media Platform

To help financial services firms adhere to corporate and regulatory standards when it comes to social media communciations, Actiance unveiled review and approval capabilities to its Socialite social-media management program.

Using the new Socialite enhancements, multiple reviewers, whether with regulatory or brand compliance, home or branch offices, will be able to systematically monitor and sign off on in-house and user-generated social media communications before they are posted to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, the company announced Monday.

“The growing demand for social and it’s acceptance in highly regulated wealth management and financial services firms has created a requirement to treat social content in the same fashion as other forms of communications,” Sarah Carter, Actiance’s general manager of Social Business, said in a statement. “Firms applying multiple review steps for email and printed content have driven the requirement to do the same for social.”

Though the platform has had pre-approval capability for almost three years, Carter says, they have found that firms need more than one person to sign off on content.

“We’ve seen some increasing requirements recently where instead of just one person approving content, we’ve seen the requirement for multiple levels of approval,” said Carter. “It’s not just all about regulatory okays. It’s also about brand okays as well. Is marketing okay with it as well as the compliance team? That’s the capability that we’ve delivered.”

The enhancement, which allows the review process to occur via email and to be automated should the content require human review, comes at an opportune time, just weeks after FINRA announced it would begin spot-checking its members’ social media communications.

“The increasing focus of FINRA to incorporate more spot checks on social further re- enforces its importance as a communications channel in the financial sector,” Carter said. “We have worked closely with customers and partners within the industry to remove perceived regulatory barriers and deliver this important capability.  It puts social on a level with other forms of communication.”

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