Being Responsible With Data While Using Social Media

Data protection is something all businesses need to be concerned with today. However, with so many different platforms of communication, it can be difficult to know where you stand. 

Social media is a great tool for finding out what your customers want from you and how they feel about your products. In fact, 72 percent of businesses use social media data to inform business decisions. 

As social media is being used as a direct communication means between business and customer, it is imperative to keep social media platforms secure and handle personal data in the correct manner. 

However, this can be incredibly difficult in the current day and age, especially if you have a distributed workforce. You can check out this guide on the key features of a distributed workforce for more information.

With that being said, in this guide, we will reveal everything you need to know about data protection and social media. 

Managing your online interactions in line with data protection 

Public messages are posted on social media platforms, which can involve personal data being exchanged. It is important to note that the data posted is owned by the person using the social media platform. It is not owned by your brand or any agency acting on behalf of your brand. 

All social media platforms will have their own guidelines and privacy notices, which every user and advertiser must comply with. 

However, on top of this, brands need to set out their own privacy notice, which indicates how personal data will be used in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and any other rules that are in place.

Running a competition on social media

Competitions have become highly popular on social media. They present brands with a great way of reaching new people. Whenever someone enters your competition, they will share your brand with their followers, and this can have a snowball effect. 

If you are going to run a competition on the likes of Twitter or Facebook, it is imperative to put together competition entry terms and conditions that explain how you will use collected data. 

Suggest that users send you information via private message

It is important to make sure that your brand’s social media policy is being implemented. If someone wants to share their personal information with your brand, it is advisable to message them and suggest that they send you this information privately. 

You can have a boilerplate message set up for situations like this. For example, “We care about the security of our customers, and we recommend that any personal details are shared privately.”

Social media users may not be aware of the consequences of sharing personal information via public messages. So, it is important to keep this in mind. Moderating your platform is imperative.

Managing your custom audiences on social media while following GDPR

A custom audience means that you have a customer list of contacts that fall within a type of audience. You can make up a custom audience from the followers that you already have on social media. For example, you may make a list of customers that have engaged with your brand “x” amount of times on Instagram. 

For a list to be created, you need to share customer information so that the platform can match it with their database. You will typically need a customer’s email or sometimes their mobile phone number. 

A vital part of this process involves data ‘hashing’ or scrambling, ensuring that it is obscured yet is still unique enough for matching to be successful. 

After the information has been matched, you will be able to target consumers on your list with specific adverts while they are using the social media platform. 

Creating a custom audience can be incredibly successful, especially if the list is segmented prior to being uploaded. 

In this scenario, you need to make it clear in your privacy notice that you are going to use the personal data held about your customers so that you can find them and contact them via social media. 

A Custom Audiences Permission Tool has been implemented by Facebook, which means that advertisers will need to confirm the correct consent under GDPR has been acquired for the personal information they upload in order to create their custom audiences. 

If you already have a data privacy notice and you have not incorporated a statement that the data you already hold will be used to find consumers on social media, you need to amend your data privacy notice as soon as possible to state that this is the case.

This is a contributed post.