Social Media Archiving Tools Comparison

Social media has become an integral part of business communication, with an unprecedented amount of data generated through social media every second. The magnitude of social media data is increasing as more businesses adopt it – a trend that has only been accelerated during the pandemic and the rapid shift to remote work which demanded alternative ways of communicating with customers and the general public.

As the volumes of social media data grow, so does the need to archive it. Not only does social media data have an enormous business value, but it has also been included in numerous compliance regulations for the retention of digital communications.

This means that companies need to capture, organize, protect and make available all social media records to prove compliance. Most companies employ social media archiving tools to achieve this.

However, choosing the right social media archiving tool isn’t easy, so here are a few tips for selecting the right one.

What Is Social Media Archiving and What are its Benefits

Social media archiving is the process by which companies move social media data like posts and direct messages away from primary systems and into safe archive storage for a prolonged length of time.

Social media archiving tools perform a few important tasks and provide a number of advantages. They:

• Help ensure regulatory compliance (FOIA, HIPAA, FINRA 10-06 and 11-39, NASD 130, SEC 17a(3) and 17a(4), FRCP, GDPR, MiFID II all mandate the retention of social media records)
• Allow companies to swiftly gather data from various sources for ediscovery and open data requests
• Allow for the simple search and retrieval of historical data
• Improve backup and restoration performance
• Free up storage space
• Lower the cost of secondary storage

Most social media platforms offer some type of native archiving capacity; however, they are often not enough to meet the archiving demands of most enterprises and compliance standards. Most companies need to invest in a specialized, third-party social media archiving solution.

With so many social media archiving tools on the market, how do you decide which one is right for your business?

What to Look for in a Social Media Archiving Tool

It helps to know which features to look for when choosing a social media archiving solution. Any decent social media archiving tool should have the following characteristics and capabilities:

• Ability to archive multimedia (images, voice messages, gifs etc.)
• Advanced search capabilities
• Ediscovery features
• Ability to customize data retention policies
• Authentication based on roles
• Indexing of documents
• Extraction of the whole text
• Digital signatures and time stamping
• Ability to capture data in real-time
• Metrics and report generation
• Encryption of data

Technical support, employee training, deployment choices, ease of implementation, and pricing are some of the other factors to take into consideration when evaluating social media archiving tools.

Social Media Archiving Tools Comparison

ArchiveSocial

ArchiveSocial is a cloud-based social media archiving solution that captures social media data in real-time for archive reasons. It is created in accordance with all legal and regulatory requirements.

With a variety of features, ArchiveSocial allows you to:

• Capture various content formats in full resolution
• Find and export the records you need quickly with filters, keywords, and tags
• Get access to your data at any time
• Easily produce reports
• Create and maintain a single list of all blocked users and pages
• Replay any record in its original context and ensure its authenticity with digital signatures, timestamps, and unmodified metadata

Pricing begins at $249 for the Economy plan. The Standard plan costs $499/month, and the Premium plan costs $699/month.

Smarsh

Smarsh is another cloud-based social media archiving tool. Unlike ArchiveSocial, Smarsh also provides archiving solutions for other forms of communication, like email and text messages.

With Smarsh social media archiving solution, users can:

• Archive content from different social media platforms in one location
• Easily find what they need with advanced search criteria
• Leverage ediscovery tools
• Set up customizable retention policies
• Leverage reporting tools to illuminate risk
• Easily access and export archived data at any time

Pricing is available upon request.

PageFreezer

PageFreezer provides a variety of services, and social media monitoring and archiving is one of them. They also offer Slack archiving, mobile text archiving, and website archiving.

• Here are some of the most important features that PageFreezer offers:
• Advanced search filters
• Defensible records to prove compliance and prepare for litigation
• Customizable data retention schedules
• Activity monitoring to prevent risks and data loss
• Extended text pattern monitoring, keyword monitoring, and policy alerts
• Retroactive social media data archiving

Pricing is available upon request.

Intradyn

Intradyn, like Smarsh and PageFreezer, provides a comprehensive suite of archiving tools, including email, social media, and text and SMS messages. Customers can either purchase single-purpose solutions depending on their specific business needs or receive everything with the complete All-in-One Archiving Solution.

Features that Indradyn offers to their customers include:

• Fully automated, real-time social media archiving
• Digitally signed and timestamped data
• Advanced search capabilities
• Role-based authentication
• Ediscovery tools
  Easy data export
• Inverted index technology

Pricing is available upon request.

Jatheon

In Jatheon, we provide multiple deployment options for social media archiving – it’s possible to add the social media archiving module to the on-premise email archive and search both archives from the same interface. Alternatively, standalone social media archiving is possible using virtual and cloud deployment.

Some of the features offered by Jatheon social media archiving include:

• AWS-based, secure platform with two-factor authentication and the highest data availability
• Legal hold automation
• Unlimited number of retention policies
• Role-based access
• Advanced search
• Complete ediscovery feature set
• Export to PST, HTML and transcript
• Capture edits and deleted messages
• Automatic data deletion after retention policies expire

Over to you

Social media archiving tools are becoming increasingly necessary for organization in all verticals and choosing the right one can make a big impact. Before choosing a social media archiving tool, you should consider your archiving needs and whether the tool offers the necessary features. We hope this social media archiving tools comparison helped you decide which solution is the best fit for your business.

To learn how Jatheon can help you implement a social media archiving solution, contact us or book a demo.