Why your company needs social media screenshot archives
Social media has come to stay, affecting our lives in diverse ways. Therefore, keeping track of published content using screenshots on these platforms is quintessential.
In this age of endless digital advertisements, keeping track of content published on social media is paramount. Contents posted online may one day somehow be needed to be retrieved for several reasons, including but not limited to legal cases, brand management, competition tracking, and so forth.
Some companies may be reluctant to archive their social media content, but that could potentially bring ugly costs. Some laws require that companies archive their digital presence, especially on social media platforms. It is only normal to use a screenshot archive service for this purpose.
Threads on social media platforms can quickly be deleted. They can never be retrieved, but having an archive of your content can prevent a lot of unfathomable ugly situations in the future. It doesn’t matter if the original source of the data (on the social media platform) has been compromised; archiving such content always gives you a first-hand unaltered data source.
Problems with manual screenshots capturing and archiving
As with every other thing, there may be alternatives for doing different kinds of tasks, but some methods are more feasible than others. Manually archiving these screenshots is undoubtedly a solution here, but there are countless flaws when using them. They include:
- Time-consuming
- Boring, repetitive task
- Prone to being forgotten
- Error-prone
Time-consuming
Imagine manually capturing screenshots of 1 social media account per day - that is probably not an exhausting task but bumping that value to 3 social media accounts being captured for, say 6 hours per day - that is totally crazy and extremely time-consuming. Using a managed service can change the narratives in this case.
Boring, repetitive task
Using the same example of capturing 3 social media accounts profile pages 6 hours, not to mention the inefficiency attached to this method. It can easily turn the grin on the face of the happiest 18-year-old man into the wrinkles on the face of a 90-year-old. Manually doing the same thing can easily make someone get bored and make them lose interest. Productivity will, in turn, be ditched in the process. Again, using a service can’t be beaten here.
Prone to being forgotten
As it is with every human, there comes a yielding point to everything. Even items on a to-do list get postponed and sometimes not even rescheduled at all. At the end of the day, the task is left for Mr. Nobody to complete. While you are seated attending to some other things, the person designated to capture those screenshots, out of the boring, repetitive, and tedious daily routine of capturing screenshots manually, has forgotten to capture the screenshots for a specific interval. What if you have so many of these blank screenshots because someone has forgotten? Indeed, not the best news of the day.
Computers are very smart and don’t forget instructions when instructed correctly. There’ll be no stories when you use a service like Stillio to schedule and capture your screenshots at any desired interval. You can capture screenshots for up to 5 minutes - ask a colleague to do that for you, and the story you get from them is good enough to be worth more than the length of this post 😜.
Error-prone
If you think that forgetting to do the task mentioned above is the only drawback of this approach, then I stand to tell you to brace up because you’ll soon be in for a surprise. Admittedly, computers sometimes make errors, but the ugly side of the story is only exponentially higher when it comes to human beings. The result of time-consuming, tedious, and repetitive tasks is equivalent to errors. The screenshots may often be in bad shape (partially captured, skipping URLs to capture, inconsistent file naming, etc.). As said earlier, computers are no angels when it comes to errors, but they certainly have whiter robes compared to humans. You might have guessed what I’ll probably say here again, and yes, you are correct - use a managed service that does this best!
Solutions to the problems (using automated services)
As you might have seen before now, there appears to be some solution to the manual approach - using automated services. While there are many tools and services to capture screenshots, only Stillio brings to the table the convenience of setting your desired capture interval with a simple click of a button.
Over the years, social media platforms are a soft target to crawlers, bots, spammers, etc. have up their games to block the mentioned categories of visitors to their sites. They have a thousand and one mechanisms in place to checkmate service abuse, and they are effectively mitigating the attacks to a considerable extent. Obviously, a lot of the screenshot capturing and archiving services get caught and by the sophisticated systems these social media platforms have built - but Stillio, being on top of the game, seamlessly bypasses all these technical hurdles set by the social media platforms and is able to capture just about any social media page, as desired.
Archive Facebook screenshots
Archiving your Facebook profile page can be of great benefit. Contents that have been published can easily be retrieved within seconds. Engagements on published posts can also be used for analytics. Looking at the archived screenshots, a company can tell what changes have happened and how the company has evolved in a given time period.
Users drop reviews, comments, and likes on Facebook profile pages and Facebook Groups as well. Archiving such content is very useful because it helps a company see how they have been performing over a given time period. You can check out our guide here on how to get started with archiving your Facebook profile page (even with those of your competitors).
Archive Twitter screenshots
Capturing your own Twitter timeline is great to start. Over time you will have the posts, the likes, the number of comments, and retweets archived, both great for analysis and your digital heritage. Another great URL to monitor with Stillio is the search for your brand, https://twitter.com/search?q=yourbrandname. If there’s a lot of talks, you may want to archive the Latest and Top Tweets as well, and each has a different deep link on Twitter. You can even archive a single tweet if there are a lot of social engagements and comments being added. To get started, check our detailed guide.
Archive Linkedin screenshots
Linkedin is considered a marketplace of professionals, job advertisements, and the likes. Ideas also get posted there. Keeping track of activities that happen there is of great benefit to any company. You can capture and archive the job advertisement page of a competitor for analytics - doing that, for example, you can easily see what vacancies always get opened. Then derives more insights from it and even makes further business decisions from the information at hand.
Financial advisors are required by law to keep a record of all their public posts. If you are in this industry and use Linkedin for publications, in that case, it will be extremely important and somewhat non-negotiable to use a service like Stillio to keep this kind of record so as to curb unnecessary and nasty surprises that could come up in the future. If you belong to other industries that the law requires you to do the same thing, you can get started monitoring your Linkedin webpages here.
Archive Instagram screenshots
As it is with other social media platforms, companies showcase a lot of new products and services on Instagram via pictures and videos, run advertisements there, etc. You can also capture user’s comments and likes on this platform for sentiment analysis. Having the archive of these pages helps to see the engagement rates over a given time period for a company. There is a detailed guide here on how to get started.
Benefits of archiving social media screenshots with Stillio
At this point, we already know that Stillio is the final destination for capturing screenshots and archiving. What other benefits do you get when you use this service to capture your social media pages? Well, a lot!
Storage
Your screenshots get archived for up to three years (within this period, you can back them up on whichever platform of your choice). That spells total control of your screenshots to me, and you can rest assured that when the lawyer asks for some screenshot evidence, Stillio can help you journey back in time within seconds and retrieve them. Did I also say that you get the files stored in a sorted and easy to manage manner?
Flexible capture settings
Do you only want to capture the mobile version of your social media page? Do you need the screenshots captured at a 5-minute interval, once a month, or something in between? Want to hide, click or hover over an element before capturing the page? Want only a certain height of the social media page to be captured? Stillio answers a rock-solid yes to all of that! Stopping the list here doesn’t mean the features have been exhausted. I’m just trying to be nice by saving you some time reading this blog, so you could have enough time to see and test for yourself what the service offers here.
Integrations
If using Google Drive or Dropbox excites you, the good news is that Stillio syncs your screenshots to these platforms automatically. We also support webhooks for even more custom control of what happens when a screenshot gets captured. Webhooks provide endless possibilities for integration; by implication, you can link Stillio with Zapier, Slack, Box, to mention but a few.
Conclusion
Haven seen the importance of capturing and archiving your social media webpages, it is important that a company starts doing that as early as possible. Stillio has proven to be a reliable service for doing that over the years. To start archiving your social media pages, start our 2-weeks free trial without any credit card commitments.