Social Media Compliance Best Practices | ICUC

Social media compliance is essential for protecting brand reputation, improving customer trust and loyalty, and reducing legal risks. But coming up with a useful, usable social media compliance strategy is not always intuitive.

In this guide, we’ll break down the components of a good social media compliance, outlining where brands should start (and what’s at risk if they don’t).

What is social media compliance?

Social media compliance doesn’t just include the posts on a company’s website.

Compliance management must also extend to affiliated posts (like influencer partnerships), user-generated content (UGC), paid campaigns, blog posts, and even private communications.

Some industries are more highly regulated than others. But in general, social media compliance can be sorted into five categories:

Governance: Determining who is responsible for what on social media and outlining how decisions get made.
Disclosures: This outlines who is speaking, what they’re saying, and if there is any material relationship.
Archiving (recordkeeping): In many cases, brands must capture, store, and retrieve all social media, so it’s ready for regulatory review.
Privacy: It’s important for brands to outline how personal, sensitive, or identifying information is handled during any social media engagements.
Accessibility: This assures that social media content is usable and understandable for people of diverse abilities.

We mentioned that social media compliance serves as a safeguard against brand damage, but its importance actually extends beyond this.

Importance of social media compliance

Social media compliance monitoring helps brands minimize legal risks, reduce costs of non-compliance, improve trust for customers and clients, and improve data protection and security measures.

It’s important to note that social media monitoring goes beyond reading customer comments and keeping a record of posts.

For full effect, social media monitoring should be an integral part of business operations. This generally requires 24/7, multilingual, and high-volume moderation. Brands that invest in monitoring of this scope enjoy:

Minimized legal risks: Social media compliance monitoring reduces organizations’ legal risk associated with regulatory violations, potential fines, lawsuits, and reputational damage.
Decreased brand safety risks: Social media compliance monitoring serves as protection against serious issues like misinformation, harmful UGC, impersonation, and fraud.
Streamlined operations: When a team owns social media compliance, organizations have faster approvals, fewer escalations, and audit readiness.
Better data security: Compliance monitoring plays a crucial role in strengthening data protection and security measures. Regularly monitoring and ensuring companies follow all policies and procedures enables brands to safeguard sensitive information and prevent data breaches.

While the above may seem like a lot of work, the consequences for companies that fail to invest in social media compliance are much more intense.

Common social media compliance risks

Social media compliance isn’t just useful because of its benefits. It is also a worthwhile investment for the following headaches that it saves brands from:

Data privacy and consent gaps: Even if unintentional, it is against many laws and regulations to improperly store client data.
Intellectual property/copyright infractions: Companies that share certain reposts, UGC, influencer content, or trending media without proper rights can find themselves subject to a copyright violation.
Unapproved or misleading claims: Teams must be careful not to use over-promising language in their posts or responses, keeping in mind how groups of people might interpret information differently.
Employee advocacy and personal-account spillover risk: In some cases, activity that happens on an employee’s personal account could be seen as a statement or endorsement from their employer.
Lack of archiving and record-keeping: Did you know that, in some industries, brands need to keep track of all of their social media activity, including even deleted posts, edited comments, and private messages? These are all technically a part of a brand’s social media footprint.
Global/multi-jurisdiction complexity: Regulations often vary between regions and platforms. Brands may need to comply with a variety of laws and regulations, depending on where their content is available.

So long as companies follow the above, they should be in compliance. But it’s helpful to be aware of the nuance of certain rules and regulations, too.

Social media compliance rules and regulations to abide by

Organizations must follow social media compliance regulations and guidelines according to their industry to avoid any legal consequences and maintain ethical practices. Let’s go over some of the most common ones.

Privacy & data

Different geographic-specific rules mandate whether brands need to comply with certain regulations.

Policies like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ePrivacy, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California Public Records Act (CPRA), and Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD) all oversee privacy across different geographic regions.

They may require companies to collect specific consent, purpose limitation, and secure handling of user data.

On social platforms, the risk is not just on posts but also comments, direct messages, and even customer care interactions. Perhaps most vulnerable are forms, landing pages, and cookie banners.

While every industry should be concerned, there are some industries that face more scrutiny than others.

Financial services

Brands in the financial services vertical are subject to even more strict guidelines, including those rules under the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

These regulations outline how firms advertise, communicate, supervise employees, and retain records.

One of the most notable requirements is SEC Rule 17a-4, which applies to certain industries and businesses. This rule covers the archiving of all business communication, keeping in mind that every post, comment, reply, and message may be considered business communication.

As strict as these requirements may be, financial services is not the only vertical that faces tightened rules.

Healthcare/pharma

Healthcare and pharmaceutical brands, too, face more scrutiny. For these brands, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and protected health information (PHI) govern how protected health information is handled.

The FDA fair balance requirements ensure brands are making accurate, backable claims and handling adverse events properly. Social media can be a risky area for these brands because patients may share personal details publicly at any time.

Speaking of backable claims, there are other rules that overlook the advertisements of all industries, not just healthcare.

Advertising & endorsements

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees advertising and endorsement compliance. It ensures brands offer honest, transparent, and clear disclosures of any and all marketing relationships. This includes influencer partnerships.

Outside of advertising, companies will also likely be held accountable for the accessibility of content.

Accessibility

An accessible strategy is a strategy where content can be understood and used by people with diverse abilities. Existing standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) oversee whether brands are compliant here.

Brands may have to make certain user experience (UX) changes in order to comply. This may cover things like captions, alt text, color contrast, and readability. On top of this, brands might also be subject to platform-specific policies.

Platform policies

As if geographic concerns weren’t enough, there are also separate considerations around every platform that a brand uses. Different channels may have different expectations around transparency and safety, just as they will have different risk triggers.

Brands should take note of what is unique and what is different about the channels they’re posting on, whether they’re running a Reddit or LinkedIn-heavy B2B social media strategy or running e-commerce ads all over TikTok.

The above concerns make it obvious how important a social media compliance program is, so let’s take a look at the core components of building one.

Elements of a compliant social media program

Teams that are looking to build a compliant social media program should approach their strategy from a few different angles, which we will outline below.

Audit & assess your current state

First, teams should build an inventory of all of their social accounts. This should include inactive and legacy profiles.

Next, they should build the content creation, approval, and publishing workflows that map where data is collected, used, stored, and shared.

This builds a solid foundation for performing a regulatory and policy gap analysis. Monitoring tools can help do this if it’s too overwhelming for the internal team.

Build a clear compliance policy and governance model

Teams should cross-collaborate to define what acceptable use, roles, approvals, archiving rules, and disclosures look like for them.

This includes something like a clear governance structure, such as who is an owner or approver and where escalation paths lead, that covers multiple regions.

Operationalize with structured workflows

To make future social media compliance easiest on your teams, teams should standardize their content creation and multi-step approval flows. This could look like using pre-approval checks and setting up moderation rules for comments, direct messages, and UGC.

This workflow should also make sure that any archived posts, edits, and comments are kept for retention periods.

For extra security, adopt a document that covers how to respond to incidents. Include a section that provides employees with advocacy guidelines should they post on their personal social media accounts.

Use technology to strengthen compliance

Technology can help brands stay compliant online. This includes tools for content management and ensuring brand compliance in social media scheduling, archival, and e-discovery systems.

Even monitoring and analytics platforms can help with risk detection. Data protection tools are also commonly used, especially when it comes to collecting consent and engaging in safe data handling. Some tools will even integrate with your existing legal and compliance tools.

If this all seems overwhelming to instate, follow the steps below.

Step-by-step compliance workflow

Compliance is not an afterthought, nor should it be piecemeal. A successful social media compliance and moderation approach should cover the following steps:

Conduct a risk assessment by market or business unit: This can be time consuming, but it’s most impactful when teams take a full inventory of all of their social media accounts. This includes ones they’re currently using and ones they’ve decommissioned.
Draft or refresh your global compliance policy with regional addenda: Teams should ideally have a unified standard, but they must also consider country-specific rules for the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada, and any other applicable jurisdiction.
Define structured approval workflows: A workflow is important because it tells teams who reviews what. For example, it’s possible that, while not every post will trigger a review from legal, there could be certain risks that signal this review.
Establish moderation rules and an escalation matrix: Here, companies set clear definitions for prohibited content and what they deem as “high-risk” categories. This tells you when an issue must be escalated to another department (like legal or compliance).
Implement monitoring and archiving solutions: Because the internet never truly shuts off, many teams opt for tools that enable real-time risk detection and constant archiving.
Train teams, agencies, and influencers: Teams have the responsibility to provide recurring education for both new hires and existing employees. It’s also often worthwhile for teams to have some kind of documentation that they can pass on to agencies or one-time collaborators.
Complete go-live operational checks: Think of this as a sort of social media compliance checklist, which checks for things like account ownership, multi-factor authentication (MFA) setup, permissions, naming conventions, and access controls.
Measure and audit regularly: Even after a post goes live, teams should run quarterly control testing. This helps teams stay up-to-date with laws and regulations, which can change quickly.

If the above process is hard to follow, or if there is nobody to own the process, it might be worthwhile to outsource your compliance efforts.

Stay compliant with ICUC

Social media compliance is an important undertaking, but it can also be overwhelming. Not all teams have the luxury of handling compliance in-house. Instead, they might choose to partner with a tool or service.

ICUC blends human expertise with tech-enhanced workflows to help support social media compliance efforts. Experienced in regulated industries, ICUC offers 24/7 monitoring, escalations, and protections in multiple languages.

If you’re looking for help maintaining safety, compliance, and customer trust without adding internal burden, book a meeting with us.

FAQ: social media compliance

How to get started managing social media compliance risks?

An audit is a good place for teams to start. This is when teams take inventory of all of their social accounts, as well as their workflows. The audit should also include regulatory requirements and existing risks across channels and strategies.

How do we manage compliance across different countries and regulations?

At its core, social media compliance is relevant for all locales. But companies that operate globally will want to make sure they also have filters in place that flag any geographic-specific legal concerns.

What should be included in a social media compliance policy?

Social media compliance policies outline what acceptable use looks like. This includes things like roles and who’s responsible for approvals.

Moderation and data handling standards are also an important part of compliance and should be included. This document is where teams set out their approach to disclosure and moderation. Certain industries and certain regions might require more compliance parameters.

How can ICUC help with social media compliance?

ICUC offers constant monitoring, structured workflows, and moderation that combines AI tools and human oversight. This allows brands to outsource their social media compliance concerns without feeling like they’re working with an outsourced company.

Social Media Compliance: A Practical Guide for Regulated Industries