Does your credit union or bank use social media? Does your bank or credit union have employees? If you answered yes to these two questions, then you need to have employee social media policies in order to mitigate risks and achieve social media compliance for credit unions or social media compliance for banks.
As a social media attorney for credit unions and banks, and I’m here to teach you how to comply with social media legal risks and FFIEC Social Media Guidance by having the appropriate social media policies.
So, first of all, before I get started, why do you need to have social media policies in the first place? One, even if your credit union or bank doesn’t use social media, your employees do. They’re on their phones, they’re on their iPads, and they can put the credit union or bank at risk. So your human resource department probably already has an employee social media use policy that tells employees about the do’s and don’ts of using social media. That’s one policy that every bank or credit union has to have, but it’s not the only one.
If your credit union or bank uses social media, meaning you have a Facebook page or a LinkedIn profile and your sharing content, even if it’s not about products or services, you need to have a Social Media Marketing Risk Management Policy. Meaning, you need to have clear guidelines of what your credit union or bank should and should not be doing in order to comply with the law. And this isn’t just me telling you that you need to have it, this is actually a requirement from the Federal Financial Institution Examination Counsel Social Media Guidance.
You see recently, the FFIEC released their social media guidance and it says that every bank, credit union or financial institution that uses social media must have a social media risk management program. This program has to include many things, but one major category is social media policies and training that helps to manage risks out of your bank or credit union social media activities. So it’s incredibly important, in fact, necessary that your credit union or bank has one.
So, what would a social media marketing risk management policy look like? The answer is, it depends. If your credit union or bank only uses social media to do community engagement such as “Happy Martin Luther King Day” or posting photographs of your employees giving back, your policy might need to include less risk management than a bank that is promoting mortgages, credits, and loans. Because in that instance, your policy has to cover those additional compliance risks itself.
In that case, your credit union social media policy must tell your social media manager or coordinator or marketing department how they can promote these products and services and what the specific types of disclosures or disclaimers that are needed for compliance. And even in the first instance, if you’re just doing community engagement, you need to comply with things like the Community Reinvestment Act by properly monitoring, preserving, and responding to questions and complaints as they arise.
So regardless of how your financial institution uses social media, you must have employee social media policies that are designed to manage those risks. But that’s not all. Your credit union or bank also needs to provide training to your employees in order to comply with these federal guidelines, meaning your bank or credit union needs to have an employee social media use training that teaches employees about the employee social media policy. Additionally, your financial institution also needs to have training for your marketing and compliance department so that they can understand how financial laws and regulations apply to the bank or credit union social media use in order to achieve social media compliance for credit unions or social media compliance for banks.
Those are just two of the social media policies that your banker credit union might need, meaning if you’re boosting content and using advertising features, you need to have guidelines that help to mitigate risks with targeted advertising. If your bank or credit union is running online giveaways, you need to have a policy and procedures in place about how to comply with contests, sweepstakes and lottery laws.
So it really depends on how your bank or credit union use social media, but regardless of how you do, you have to manage those social media legal risks and have the right social media policies and training in place to make sure you stay out of trouble.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “Ethan, this all sounds good, but I’m not sure what these laws are or what should be included as part of my social media risk management program?” Well, never fear, The Social Media Law Firm is here. You can download our free guide on how banks and credit unions can manage social media legal risk by visiting financialfridays.co. That’s financialfridays.co, not .com. We couldn’t afford the darn domain name. It was like $2,000. But you can download our guide for free at financialfridays.co. And if you can use help putting in place what your bank or credit needs to manage risks and be compliant on social media, just reach out to us below.
