The right way to Align With Your Compliance Group on Social Media Technique

Posted by Doug Wilber

IIn order for marketing strategies for social media banks to be successful, marketers and compliance teams need to work together to create and distribute compliant and engaging content. However, compliance and marketing teams often work towards different goals: marketers want to promote, and compliance officers want to protect.

Social distancing and widespread remote working have made this challenge even more pressing as collaboration is decentralized. Consensus can be difficult to reach in a virtual environment. In addition, banks had to update their strategies to reach and attract potential clients and customers throughout the pandemic. Without personal interaction, social media marketing has become a key method for banks to reach their target audience.

Compliance teams have to grapple with social media regulations and face increased workloads and unfamiliar tactics and strategies. For example, banks that only started social media marketing last year have had to put in place new review and approval processes that are very different from traditional media approvals of the past.

Despite having different goals, marketers and compliance teams need each other. Marketers need to avoid regulatory hot water on their social media and other electronic messages. Compliance teams, along with the rest of the institution, need dedicated and effective marketing strategies to stay competitive and continue to secure revenue.

It is up to bank executives to enable better collaboration between compliance and marketing teams to ensure this success. However, this doesn’t have to be a tedious process – even in a virtual environment. With the right tools and approach, any bank can create a compliant and effective social media marketing strategy. Start with the following steps:

Set up automated approval workflows

In the age of remote work, everyone is using more internal electronic communication. A study shows that within just eight weeks of the pandemic, employees sent more than 5 percent more emails in one day.

Attachments and endless email chains are recipes for missing information, confusion, and errors. Fortunately, software exists to automate approval workflows and ensure that the right people – from marketing directors to compliance officers and more – get every social media post and commitment from a bank for review, commentary, and approval. No content will go live without properly unsubscribing.

Create compatible content libraries

Social selling, where employees post branded content on their own profiles, is a popular and lucrative social media strategy. However, it leaves more room for social media regulation and compliance missteps as an unapproved employee post or comment could get the institution into regulatory trouble. To avoid such a mistake, marketers can keep employee content compliant and branded by creating content libraries that have already been approved by the compliance team.

That way, staff can simply go to the library and select a pre-approved post to share. Additionally, marketing teams can save compliance officers time and energy reviewing these posts by setting up software with filters to automatically flag potentially problematic keywords. For example, they could add the word “guarantee” as a filter to notify compliance every time that keyword appears in a post to make it easier to get a promise language.

Automatically archive all content and engagements

In today’s digital age, most banks would no longer have had to use physical papers to record social media posts and engagements in the event of an audit. Even so, manually entering all of your bank’s social media posts and correspondence into spreadsheets can be a tedious task.

The right software can automate this process and compile every single social media engagement into an easily accessible and searchable archive. Be prepared if FINRA ever knocks on your door for a compliance audit and save your teams time and potential cross-departmental hurdles with technology that can do it for them.

It is imperative that your marketing and compliance teams stay connected. The specific roles and responsibilities of these two departments are different, but ultimately they should work together to reach prospects and customers with helpful, engaging, and compliant content. No department can achieve this goal without the help of others.

Doug Wilber is the CEO of Denim Social, which supports ABA for social media management solutions.

Photo by Karen Martin

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