FAQs
General questions
Social Media Check has been designed specifically for individuals and businesses, ensuring both personal and company reputation can be maintained.
Individuals would find doing a Social Media Check useful when going for a job or promotion, applying for a student place, university or work placement or when joining a sports team.
Businesses would benefit from using Social Media Check when they are looking to hire a new employee or offer an existing employee a promotion.
Any organisation that requires a DBS check as part of the hiring process.
For small businesses or individuals, the cost of buying a report is £33.33 + VAT (£39.99 including VAT) and these can be purchased quickly and easily. You can buy a report for yourself or for an individual HERE.
For larger businesses, we offer pre-purchase volume discounts and the price paid is directly linked to the volume of reports purchased.
Email our business support team today to request a solution consultation at sales@socialmediacheck.com
The individual receives an email asking them to consent to a social media check being conducted. The email details the company requesting the report so that this individual is aware of why this report has been requested and by whom.
The individual then has to consent to share their social media account credentials with Social Media Check in order to grant access to each individual social media account.
Only when these consents for each platform have been received can a social media check report be conducted. If an individual doesn’t consent, the report cannot be conducted.
The Social Media Check platform distributes the report and the certificate to the person who requested it. The individual whose accounts have been checked can receive a copy of the report, but this would have to be done by the requestor manually.
Yes, providing the business who requested the report has shared it with the individual.
The report contains links to content under the 10 key risk classifiers; extremist groups, hate speech, potential nudity, swearing and profanity, toxic language, violent images, drugs, weapons, firearms, client keywords.
This allows the business and the individual to click on the link, review the highlighted content and, if appropriate, for the individual to update the content or delete the post entirely.
The business and/or individual then has the opportunity to buy a second report to do a final check if desired.
The report
A Social Media Check report can be configure to check “Public Only” or “Public and Private” posts. This is achievable since the report is fully consented by the candidate. The public and private post report is able to see content that wouldn’t ordinarily be seen when conducting manual social media checks.
A candidate can check up to five accounts on each Social Media platform within a single report token. For example, if a candidate had a Facebook account for their personal content plus a Facebook account for a club / organisation that they run, both of these could be declared within the consent stage and both of these accounts would be checked within the scope of a standard report.
For most candidates, our Social Media check will check the entire social network post history of that individual. The check starts at the most recent post made and works back historically over time checking every post found.
We do have a fair usage policy that it is worthy to note. This means that a standard report will check up to 18,200 posts maximum. These are sub divided as follows:
- X – Maximum of 3,200 posts
- All other Social Platforms – Maximum of 15,000 posts
Over the past 100,000 reports processed, the number of candidates who had social media content exceeding this “fair usage” policy was less than 0.238% (just 238 candidates).
Social Media Check will only check the channels that have been consented to by an individual.
The content that the system then analyses includes the posts, blogs, titles, text and images within these posts.
Content that is not currently analysed includes private messages, comments made by the individual on another persons posts, video and liked posts.
We do have a fair usage policy that it is worthy to note. This means that a standard report will check up to 18,200 posts maximum. These are sub divided as follows:
- X – Maximum of 3,200 posts
- All other Social Platforms – Maximum of 15,000 posts
Over the past 100,000 reports processed, the number of candidates who had social media content exceeding this “fair usage” policy was less than 0.238% (just 238 candidates).
The report contains lots of useful information including the number of platforms analysed, how many posts have been checked and the number of posts with findings.
Each inappropriate post is allocated against one of the 10 key risk classifiers (extremist groups, hate speech, potential nudity, swearing and profanity, toxic language, violent images, drugs, weapons, firearms, client keywords) with a description of the finding and a link to the content.
The individual can view the post by clicking on the link. This post can then be amended or deleted as appropriate.
A Social Media Risk certificate is included at the end of the report which proves useful at job interviews, for example.
For individuals and small businesses, reports are emailed to the individual who originally requested and paid for it. There is then the option to download and save the report as a pdf for future reference.
For large businesses, all social media reports are retained and will be accessible within a UK secure portal for a period of 1 year. It is important for corporate customers to save local copies of the report and certificate output if retention beyond this time frame is required.
The 6 main social media platforms that are checked include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Medium and Tumblr.
Each social media platform is checked against the 10 key risk classifiers; extremist groups, hate speech, potential nudity, swearing and profanity, toxic language, violent images, drugs, weapons, firearms, client keywords.
The final report shows findings against each of these classifiers.
Individuals can post several times a day over a number of different platforms over a period of years. This amounts to thousands of written posts that need to be checked. Manual review of a post would typically take 10 seconds, to manually check an individual’s entire post history could take someone days!
Thankfully, our automated Social Media Check can perform a full check in under 60 minutes whilst removing all risks of unconscious bias or human error. All you need to do is send the link to your candidate, allow them to self-register, consent to the check, then sit back and wait for the report to arrive in your inbox.
Security
Yes, the entire process complies with GDPR regulations. The individual for whom the check is required must consent to the check being conducted. Without this consent, the check cannot be undertaken.
Integration & system management options
Social Media Check utilises report tokens to manage service credit. “Packs” of report credit are purchased and loaded onto your master environment by the Social Media Check team.
Once loaded, the client can then distribute credit across sub-accounts (i.e. Departments / Divisions, or other sub-companies) as required.
Social Media Check has a published API allowing it to be seamlessly integrated to our client’s back-office systems.
This is especially useful if a client is running a service agency providing other checks (i.e. DBS, ID Check, Right to Work, etc.). The communication to request a candidate complete a check is usually sent from the client’s back-office system. Once the client has consented, the Social Media Check outputs are then sent directly to that candidates record within the back-office system.
The Only Social Media Checks Your Company Needs
Interested in becoming a partner. Get in touch today to see how Social Media Check can benefit your company.