Introduction

In this guide, you will gain an understanding of the key technical considerations when evaluating a social relationship platform to meet your organization-wide requirements, including:

• Governance
• Security
• Compliance
• Scalability
• Platform Integration

Social media typically arrives in an enterprise company at the business unit level, as various divisions create their own presences on public social networks. This decentralized pattern is repeated when some business units adopt social relationship platforms to manage growing numbers of accounts and users. However, most security measures vary from department to department.

Whitout centralized ownership of corporate social media profiles, it's nearly impossible to prevent password sharing or even know which employees have access to which accounts. Revoking or adjusting social media permissions is a constant source of frustration for IT departments, who are called in to clean up issues that stem from a variety of unconnected, unsupported systems. Company policies meant to ensure regulatory compliance and brand standards are rendered meaningless by poor security and account provisioning. IT depart

IT departments at large enterprises have recognized these threats and are beginning to centralize social media with an organization-wide social relationship platform. HootSuite Enterprise provides a secure environment for social media across every device and department, allowing you to reap the rewards of enterprise-scale social communication without overwhelming compliance officers or putting your brand at risk

Governance

Effective social media governance can't be achieved through technology alone, but no policy or process can work without a robust platform. Because technology should map to the unique goals and workflows of your organisation, HootSuite Enterprise has been built to enable any governance approach, from a contained, centralized model to an entirely dispersed, decentralized strategy.

Here’s how HootSuite Enterprise meets your governance requirements:

Social Account Management

• Discover and organize company accounts.
• Persistently monitor social networks for unauthorized and fraudulent accounts.

Organizational Flexibility

• Build role-based team structures that reflect the way your company does business.
• Securely incorporate partners, contractors and agencies into your enterprise’s social media operations with granular control over publishing and data access.

Granular Permissions

• Safeguard valuable social assets with highly customizable user permissions.
• Give managers as much or as little control as they require over team member permissions or social network accounts.
• Manage interns and contractors with publishing approval queues.

Secure Profiles

Even the most experienced social media manager can accidentally select the wrong profile to publish their personal message to, creating an acute brand crisis. Hootsuite Secure Profiles protects your brand from careless human errors.

• Account owners can designate chosen social profiles as "secure" for their designated Team Members.
• Team Members are prompted to manually confirm messages before braodcasting to secured profiles
• Profiles are secured across all platforms including web, tablet and mobile.

Security

Your organization’s employees are bringing social media into the workplace because it’s proven to improve business results. Unfortunately, they’re probably bringing some lax consumer attitudes toward security along with them. They may create weak passwords for social media accounts and share them with coworkers. Complicating matters further, they typically want to be able to access both personal and business-related social profiles from their own devices at any time. Consequently, social media security must be an integral component of every company’s bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy. Social media affects your entire organization's risk profile, so security can't be left to individual departments to figure out on their own.

Here’s how HootSuite Enterprise helps IT leaders rationalize social media security:

Security Audit

HootSuite’s team of security experts can help your organization safeguard your social accounts against internal and external threats. Identify potential social media security breaches before they occur. Audit current access levels on native social networks, and migrate access to HootSuite’s secure environment as appropriate.

Single Sign-On

Users with Single Sign-On gain access to HootSuite by using their enterprise network identity, eliminating the need for multiple passwords to multiple business applications. Any enterprise network that supports Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML) can extend user authentication for HootSuite accounts. When an employee leaves your organization, your network administrator can effortlessly revoke the employee's access to HootSuite through your Active Directory.

Secure Connections

To ensure the safety of your organization’s accounts and data, all connections to HootSuite are communicated over HTTPS. Users who attempt to connect over HTTP are automatically redirected to HTTPS.

Real-time Security Alerts

If one of your social media accounts is compromised, every second matters. HootSuite Enterprise offers push alerts to notify certified teams when suspicious posting activity is detected on their Twitter accounts.

BYOD Security

Mobile computing promises tantalizing business impact across every functional area of your company, but opens up significant security and compliance threats that have to be dealt with strategically. As your enterprise conducts more of its business outside the corporate firewall on employee-owned mobile devices, your social media accounts need to be kept safe from malicious attacks and careless mistakes by end-users.

Compliance

For regulated institutions, social media demands the same rigorous approach to compliance as other modes of communication. In fact, the only way to effectively securer your own organisation against brand damage or regulatory violations on public social networks is to bring your social relationship platform into your existing compliance infrastructure. By connecting social media to the technology that your compliance team is already using, your organization will be able to maintain consistent policies and confidently scale up communications. Here is how HootSuite Enterprise enables your organization to meet its regulatory requirements:

Maintain Compliance Workflow

• Incorporate compliance officers publishing approval queue.
• Eliminate publishing from unauthorized thirdparty apps.

Manage Policies

Establish specific policies for business units divisions, and groups. Ensure that each social account under management meets FINRA, HIPAA, SEC, and PCI standards or even your own custom policies.