The rise of Fintech has changed how the world makes, saves, and interacts with money, and there are plenty of positives associated with this innovation. For the compliance departments in these financial services organizations, responsible for monitoring thousands of online interactions, though, things are not as rosy.
Financial institutions rely on social media to connect with customers, promote their products, and even address customer inquiries. These platforms have become essential communication channels—channels that fall squarely under regulatory oversight.
Social media compliance monitoring requires firms to retain records of business-related posts and ensure content shared by employees or affiliated influencers meets marketing regulatory standards. Any deviation from approved messaging, failures in recordkeeping, or inaccurate claims can expose firms to fines, sanctions, legal scrutiny, and reputational harm.
Firms are under incredible pressure to make the most of these fast-moving channels while adhering firmly to regulatory requirements. For financial service providers that want to ensure social media compliance monitoring that aligns with recordkeeping rules from the SEC and FINRA, this guide offers solutions and highlights the role of tools like Pagefreezer in building a database of audit-ready social media records.
Understanding Social Media Compliance Monitoring Rules
Financial institutions operate under some of the strictest communication rules of any industry. Regulatory bodies, such as the SEC, FINRA, and the FCA, hold firms accountable for everything they publish, across every platform and in every format.
These rules are extensive and often apply beyond what many teams expect.
What the SEC rules say about social media monitoring
Under Rule 17a-3 and 17a-4, The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) mandates which documents and communications financial firms must retain, for how long, and in what format. The rules encompass a wide range of records, but also include electronic communications like social media posts.
The Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), was initiated to prohibit “selective disclosure” by public companies to professionals and shareholders. This means all information that affects share prices must be disclosed to market professionals and relevant stakeholders to ensure compliance.
The SEC marketing rule covers how financial advisors can advertise, including testimonials and reviews on their social media pages.
When it comes to social media posts, these regulations cover a wide breadth of content, including:
- Social Media Posts: All communications must be fair, balanced, complete, and not omit material facts. Prohibited content includes exaggerated claims, performance predictions (with some exceptions), and unsubstantiated statements.
- Announcements: Publicly traded companies can use social media to announce material information, provided they have previously notified investors about which channels they will use.
- Social Media Endorsements: Likes, shares, links, or connections by employees may be considered endorsements or the unintentional reveal of material information, covered under the Reg FD.
- Legal Disclaimers: The SEC often requires company news shared on online social media platforms to be accompanied by cautionary statements. But with character limits on some platforms, the fine print is often omitted.
- Public Offerings: During IPOs or share issuances, companies must be extra cautious as social media posts may count as written offers under SEC rules.
Even some of the biggest global companies can run afoul of these tricky regulations. In 2012, Netflix was issued a Wells Notice by the SEC for revealing, on Chief Executive Reed Hastings’ personal Facebook account, that viewers had consumed one billion viewing hours in one month. The SEC noted that investors were not informed beforehand that social media would be used to divulge this information, and the regulatory body censured the executive for not using official channels to post the information.
That isn’t just a one-off incident, either. More recently, in 2023, the SEC fined 25 advisory firms, broker-dealers, and credit rating agencies a combined $400 million for using off-channel messaging platforms.
👉 Learn more about SEC & FINRA Recordkeeping Requirements here.
FINRA requirements for social media compliance
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is responsible under federal law for supervising broker-dealers in the US, under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
For example, FINRA Rule 2210 governs the manner in which firms communicate with the public, including advertisements. It requires organizations to always offer clear, non-misleading information and appropriate disclosures. Rule 3110 adds obligations around supervision and approval of this communication, while 4511 sets retention and books-and-records standards.
FINRA’s rules for the proper handling of social media include:
- Books and Records: All business communications, regardless of whether they were sent from a personal device or account, must be retained for at least six years.
- Supervision and Content Approval: Firms are required to supervise all business-related social media activity of their associates. Before using any social media platform or posting, the site and posts must be reviewed and approved.
- Third-Party Content and Linking: Firms are also responsible for monitoring and maintaining records of third-party content posted to their accounts. This includes reshares from third-parties. They must also never link to third-party sites that may contain misleading information.
- Suitability and Content Standards: All firms must develop procedures to supervise electronic communications that recommend products or services.
Fines for non-compliance with any of these rules can be tremendously costly.
In October 2025, FINRA censured a robo-advisory and online brokerage firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, for failing to preserve tens of millions of business-related electronic communications. The firm, Ally Invest, paid $850,000 in penalties.
Other Consumer Financial Protection Regulations
While the SEC and FINRA oversee the majority of guidelines for financial firms, social media monitoring compliance also requires staying up to date with a few other acts and regulations, such as:
- Truth-in-Lending Act: This rule applies to any commercial message that promotes credit products or services. Institutions must include specific disclosures when referencing interest rates or credit terms, even in social media posts.
- Truth-in-Savings Act: Also known as Regulation DD, it ensures advertisements for deposit accounts are not misleading or inaccurate. Social media posts promoting deposit products are held to the same standards as those on websites or in print.
- Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: This law requires institutions to safeguard sensitive customer information. Any communication—especially those offering customer service or discussing account details—must protect data from exposure.
Compliance with these regulations is critical. All staff involved in creating or managing content, particularly those working on social media or customer-facing platforms, must be trained to recognize when disclosures are required and how to apply them effectively.
A frontline service rep responding to a customer inquiry on LinkedIn or X could easily cross regulatory lines without knowing it. If the message contains product-specific language or skips disclosures, the firm could face scrutiny, sanctions, or fines. As an added challenge, the volume and velocity of social content can make compliance with these regulations even more complicated.
The “Finfluencer” Problem
One of the biggest challenges of social media compliance monitoring lies with finfluencers. More financial firms and institutions than ever before are using social media influencers to promote their products and services online. It’s a natural fit—surveys suggest up to 79% of millennial and Gen Z audiences seek financial advice online.
However, in practice, this creates a whole new set of problems for recordkeeping and compliance teams. Finfluencers operate across social media platforms and often share strategies without a credible background or knowledge about regulatory compliance. Firms that engage with finfluencers must be extra careful to monitor content.
In fact, M1 Finance was fined $850,000 by the FINRA for its use of influencers to promote products in an unbalanced or unfair manner between January 2020 and April 2023.
How Pagefreezer Supports Social Media Compliance Monitoring
While compliance management software can help teams stay abreast of audits and stay on schedule, many organizations still struggle to modernize the task of archiving. For these teams, Pagefreezer is the perfect fit. The software automates the archiving of corporate social media accounts, ensuring financial institutions meet regulatory recordkeeping and oversight requirements.
By connecting directly to your official accounts across platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, the tool captures:
- Posts, comments, replies, including any edits or deletions.
- Metadata, including timestamps, user details, and context.
- Multimedia assets like images and videos.
Crucially, Pagefreezer also preserves each version of the content in its original context. So if a post is later edited or deleted, the original remains in a tamper-proof archive.
Over time, this creates a full, searchable record with digital signatures and timestamps that prove authenticity and integrity. Pagefreezer also supports compliance workflows:
- Audit-ready exports with full metadata and audit-logs make it easy to respond to regulators or legal inquiries.
- Retention schedules and legal holds ensure data is preserved according to regulatory requirements or internal investigations.
- Powerful search and retrieval functions allow compliance teams to quickly find relevant records across all archived accounts and present them when required.
- Self-serve portals allow compliance teams to give auditors direct access to records as needed.
How WebPreserver Collects Evidence For Investigations
While routine archiving with Pagefreezer captures most social media activity, you may have noticed one glaring gap: third-party communications.
Financial firms often find themselves in situations where they need detailed, forensic evidence of things posted outside of official communications. When an agent is accused of misconduct, for instance, or an influencer’s post raises compliance questions, firms need tools that preserve content with full defensibility.
In this case, we recommend using WebPreserver. WebPreserve captures publicly available social media posts, comments, threads, and web pages with timestamps, detailed metadata, and cryptographic hashing. Unlike regular screenshots, WebPreserver ensures the evidence collected is admissible in regulatory or legal proceedings. It is also capable of capturing multimedia posts and videos.
For example, when M1 Finance was fined for its social media compliance failures, WebPreserver could have helped by providing the firm with rapid and defensible capture of social media content posted by its influencers, so they had a complete record of what was said, when, and where.
The tool complements the Pagefreezer archiving solution by providing targeted, on-demand evidence collection for investigations, regulatory inquiries, or litigation.
As social media compliance monitoring becomes a part of everyday operations, financial firms need all the help they can get to withstand scrutiny. Book a demo to learn how to protect your customers, your reputation, and the bottom line.
