Most business and government operations currently rely on several social media platforms as their voice in the world. Almost every organization also uses social media for its internal and customer communications and brand messaging. Most companies have unfortunately disregarded the need to archive their social media content.
Whether it is for brand reputation, legal compliance, or preserving information for its historical, cultural or commercial significance, the need for social media archive services is now paramount. There are now different SaaS (software as a service) solutions which automatically archive your social media messages. Here are the various aspects of the best software to pick for your organization.
Time Stamps
The archiving software you choose should automatically stamp each of the pages it stores with a time stamp. This details the exact point of collection of the stored data. There are different compliance standards used for the timestamps on archiving software. Regardless of your choice, however, timestamps cannot be changed without detection. This provides valid evidence of their time of collection.
Storage Optimization
This feature will allow your software to minimize the data volume in production and maintain seamless data access. The benefits of overall software storage optimization include reduced operating and capital expenditures and low-security risk. The feature will also allow access to secondary data essential in analysis and reporting and improved information governance. As your data archives grow, software which is storage optimized will avert the risk of content duplication.
Flexibility
Your archiving software should be flexible to support a broad range of data platforms. This way, you can archive all your conversations irrespective of a user’s network, location or device. A flexible data archiving software will also handle a variety of data targets and sources and writing abilities for the data’s extraction purposes.
Granularity
This element refers to your software’s level of detail. Your archiving software should be as granular as possible to allow you to search and access relevant information from a vast pool of archived messages. The software you select should execute searches based on file authors, data sources and types, crucial data pieces and information matching a specific structure rather than an item.
Data Exporting Ability
There are times you might need to share your archives with others for one reason or another. More often than not this is to prove something or compare the data for policymaking. The data archiving software you choose should enable you to export your data in different formats including Excel, CSV, JSON, WARC, and PDF.
In addition to the above distinguishing elements, some software developers offer live replays which will allow you to rerun the archived data automatically. Social media data archiving software generally works for Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr. The software works for virtually every social media marketing effort. The ideal choice to ensure you recoup a handsome ROI is to work with the best software provider available. This generally requires making cost a secondary factor in your search for a data archiving software for your social media platforms.