White paper: What do social media trends mean for education institutions?

Introduction

It’s often tempting to view social media as simply an extension of email correspondence or newsletters. In the early days of social networking, that may have held some truth, but today, social media has become a juggernaut in its own right. Social media has grown at a rate no-one could have predicted and is quickly evolving into a new beast of legal responsibilities.

For educational institutions, social media platforms are fast becoming places of liability. Incidents that trigger lawsuits are occurring online, and they require just as much investigation and documentation as any incident that occurs on-site at your institution.

Posting on social media may seem in the moment, but these sorts of scenarios demand rigor around archiving your engagements.

This paper looks to highlight some overarching issues around social media engagement, and provide a state by state overview of guidelines and policies that apply to education institutions.

What happens if:

• Someone wants to sue you over a comment on a social post that no longer exists, and only they have a screenshot?
• Someone has been bullied or harassed online and you need access to the posts to take appropriate action, but they’ve been deleted or edited?
• You receive a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act?

The evidence is in: it’s time to invest in serious social media archiving

As archiving policies grow stricter and broader in their scope, a traditional manual approach to archiving online content will no longer cut it. If your state hasn’t already implemented policies around digital record keeping, it’s very likely that archiving social media will be law by the time your current Year 7 students reach Year 12. As such, a comprehensive, searchable social media archiving tool is the easiest way to ensure compliance.

Brolly’s social media archiving service is ready to help your institution meet these demands. We use intelligent software to automatically archive your social media for you 24/7 (and quickly retrieve archived content as necessary) to ensure your institution remains compliant at all times and is ready to quickly respond to any crisis or incident that occurs online. Contact us to learn more about how we can help your institution tackle the 21st-century hurdles of social media archiving.