How Much Time Do Employees Spend on Social Media?

A visit to a social media site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube has become a common daily ritual for most people. Whether at home,…

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December 04, 20145 minute read

A visit to a social media site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube has become a common daily ritual for most people. Whether at home, on the bus, or even while having lunch with friends, if their data plan allows or if there’s a bit of free WiFi to borrow, most people will tweet, post a pic, or Like something by using one of the popular social media tools.

The use of these tools on your employee’s personal time is fine, but if they are visiting these sites while at your workplace, they are wasting your time, your money, and are adding unwarranted risks to your network. Do you know if your employees are visiting social media sites on your corporate network, and do you know what they are posting in their messages?

Are your employees wasting company time on Social Media?

Unfortunately, you probably have no idea if your employees are using social media at work, and/or what they they are posting. Unless you are actively blocking them from accessing these sites, it is a safe bet that they are using one or more of social media tools to communicate during business hours on your network. You must be aware of the risks the use of social media in the workplace poses.

Some of the risks of social media in the workplace include:

  • Productivity loss
  • Confidential data leakage
  • Liability from personal messages
  • Harassment and bullying
  • Discrimination
  • Inappropriate communication

According to a 2014 Salary.com survey of employees, 89% of employees surveyed report wasting time at work each day. This is a 20% increase from last year. A large majority of that time is spent online. Of the online time-wasters, 24% list Google as their primary destination. Facebook was a close second at 23%. LinkedIn was third at 14%. Various other online destinations were also cited including: Yahoo (7%), Amazon (2%), YouTube (2%), ESPN (2%), with Pinterest, Twitter, and Craigslist each receiving 1%.

The traditional work-year clocks in at 2,080 hours, or 260 work days annually. Suppose your employees spent 10 minutes each work day Tweeting or checking Facebook when they should be working? That comes to 2,600 minutes a year — over 43 work-hours, down the drain. Now multiply that amount by the number of employees working at your organization. That is a lot of time and money wasted.

Let’s concede two things: that you don’t want to be that employer who blocks all social media use, and that you recognize that the wasted time is going to occur. How do you protect your company and prevent potentially harmful content from being posted during the workday?

Easily Monitor Social Media Accounts

What if you could easily monitor and archive what is posted to your corporate social media accounts? By doing so, you could prevent embarrassment or damage to your organization’s reputation, as well as protect yourself from legal action as a result of inappropriate social media messages.

Micro Focus has teamed up with ArchiveSocial to create the solution – Retain Social.

Retain Social monitors and archives social media usage on your business network, including:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • Vimeo
  • Pinterest
  • Google+

Retain Social allows organizations monitor and archive corporate social media accounts. This archived data can be instantly retrieved and reviewed to help ensure compliance, help protect your organization’s reputation, enforce company policies, and reduce corporate liability.

How does it work? Well, ArchiveSocial monitors and captures information from any social media account that it is configured to monitor. A quick demo on their website shows you just how easily this is done. Enter the account name, verify and authorize ArchiveSocial, and the software takes care of the rest. Once the information is captured it is sent to Retain’s Unified Archiving Server (more on this later). An important feature of ArchiveSocial’s capturing method is that all social media posts or messages are captured and stored in their native format, complete with metadata. This ensures that all posts can be used in court litigation cases and that the entire story is told. ArchiveSocial also comes complete with a Risk Management and Analytics (RMA) package. This gives you insights into your accounts as well as preventing embarrassing posts through keyword monitoring. If an employee is about to send out an inappropriate post, comment, or message, you will be notified. You can also monitor the activity levels of your accounts. The RMA package, of course, plugs in and works seamlessly with Retain.

Easily Monitor and Archive ALL Enterprise Communication

Now, what if you could monitor and archive ALL communication data that traveled through your network? I’m not talking about just monitoring for social media posts, but also monitoring and archiving all email messages, and even mobile phone SMS & MMS messages as well. With Retain Unified Archiving you can do all of this!

Retain by Micro Focus provides multi-platform unified message archiving of social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yammer), email (including Exchange, Office 365, Gmail, and GroupWise), and mobile messaging SMS/MMS data (for BlackBerry®, Android, and iOS).

Retain provides your company with the best tools to meet your communication compliance needs, as well as providing legal case assessment, search, and eDiscovery tools. The Retain archive is accessible by end users and administrators directly through Retain’s Web Access Archive Viewer. This enables your organization to quickly access, search, and audit archived communication data, and when necessary, to easily place litigation holds, print, forward, save, redact, and export your message data. Retain reduces cost, mitigates risk, and manages complexity on prem or in the cloud.

Micro Focus is featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving. Micro Focus was selected for Retain’s ability to provide organizations with industry-leading solutions for compliance and e-discovery, reducing primary storage needs, and implementing a unified archiving solution for email, social media and mobile communication data.

See how Retain can help you ensure that your organization is protected and compliant! Fill out the form below to get a quote!

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OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight through market-leading information management solutions, powered by OpenText Cloud Editions.

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