Three Good Reasons You Should Outsource Social Media Research

The times are changing - fast. From a pandemic and social unrest to rising costs and disruptions to global supply chains, we have seen tremendous changes in the last two years. During this time, we have also seen an increase in social media use among all age groups. 

With more people living their lives online and leaving vast amounts of digital crumbs across the internet, data is becoming the new gold. 

At Social Discovery, we know how important social media research is for our clients. From insurance carriers and risk management professionals to private investigators and background screeners, every day we are helping hundreds of professionals gather data across social media sites that helps them make important decisions for their business.

What all our clients know is that the process of gathering accurate and timely information about a person of interest is no easy feat. Many of the businesses we work with have tried doing social media research on their own. What they ultimately found was that hiring an experienced vendor made more sense for a number of reasons.     

In this article, we examine the top three reasons our clients told us they chose to engage a social media background screening partner rather than doing this work in-house.  

Reason #1: We found that doing social media research in-house is time consuming and more costly 

Saving money usually tops the list of reasons why some businesses try to do social media research in-house. “Why should we pay someone else to do a job that we can do ourselves” is a common line of thinking. However, a few months down the road, it becomes obvious that “doing it on your own” is draining the company’s resources without getting the results you were expecting. 

Scouring the internet and various social media platforms, positively identifying a person’s identity, collecting, collating and analyzing hundreds upon hundreds of lines of text, images and videos is extremely time consuming for in-house staff. For any company that has done in-house research, it quickly becomes obvious that their staff’s time would be better spent on other tasks. 

Reason #2: Our staff is not trained or equipped to do thorough social media research

Many social media users are savvy and become suspicious of unusual activity or searches of their account information. This often prompts people to make their profiles and other identifying information private. Doing so can mean hours of your employees’ time going to waste and hitting a dead end in a fraud case or background check. 

When your company performs social media analysis in-house, you may face frustrations as you attempt to sift through huge amounts of unclear or outdated information. You are at increased risk of finding - and acting on - false or out-of-date information. This can affect your hiring department’s ability to do good work, it can interfere with the legal process or may disrupt fraud investigation.  

Reason #3: Our company doesn’t have the right tools and technology to conduct social media searches on a regular basis 

One of the main problems of in-house social media research is not knowing whether the information you found is accurate and whether your search was exhaustive. Did the employee who performed the search do a good job of looking at all the relevant social media accounts? And how about the person of interest’s family, relatives and friends? Did they miss a seemingly insignificant bit of information that can turn out to be the piece of evidence you need? The truth is, you can’t really be sure. 

Conducting thorough and comprehensive social media research and analysis requires advanced technology in combination with the trained eyes of social media analysts who are experts at what they do. It is a full time job and it takes many hours of training, practice and experience to become highly proficient at this type of research.

Key Takeaways 

Choosing a reputable social media background reporting partner gives businesses access to advanced technology and trained and experienced experts in the field.  

At Social Discovery, we pride ourselves on the unique business model that we have built around AI - Accurate Intelligence. It is a winning combination of innovative machine learning techniques and human interaction and patience. Using a combination of technology and dedicated employees ensures that we deliver complete, accurate and actionable results - every time! 

We save our clients time, money, unnecessary frustration, and potential reputational risks and lawsuits by providing them with social media reports that adhere to the highest standards of quality and accuracy.  

If you would like to learn more, please reach out to us to speak with one of our representatives and book a demo.