Social media monitoring involves using tools to listen to millions of online discussions to find out what is being said about a specific brand, problem, person, or product and identify opportunities. Any business strategy that wants to succeed needs to use social media. 

Any unfavorable information about an individual or group of individuals published, disclosed, or found on a publicly visible and accessible channel is referred to as negative news or adverse media. 

Like Facebook, most social media monitoring tools operate by constantly crawling and indexing websites, occasionally in real-time. Once all those websites have been indexed, you can search through them to discover mentions, sentiments, and views on particular goods, services, organizations, individuals, locations, etc.

Social media monitoring is crucial to the customer or third-party due diligence operations. It helps to identify hazards suggesting a party's potential involvement in alleged criminal conduct, which could result in financial, reputational, or other forms of risks to your firm.

Why we conduct social media monitoring - image from pixabay by LoboStudioHamburgBanks' customers may engage in an unlawful activity or have connections to criminal gangs, including money launderers. Customers in the high-risk category for the bank are much more at stake. As a result, banks continuously and frequently monitor the transactions and activities of their customers. Such tasks include searching for their names and profiles in bad news or on various unfavorable media portals.

A suitable social media monitoring may reveal or point out a bank's customer's involvement in forbidden or criminal activities, including money laundering, sponsorship of terrorism, fraud, organized crime, racketeering, and so forth.

The risk-based approach to money transfer and activity tracking is a proactive way of analyzing client risks. Businesses must ensure that activities are related to the initial due diligence data gathered from the customer at the time of connecting. According to the RBA, banks must do due diligence. The riskier the client, the more thoroughly they will be initially screened and continuously monitored.

Non-profit organizations, philanthropic organizations, politically exposed persons (PEPs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are a few examples of clients classified as high-risk. The bank must carry out EDD procedures for these high-risk clients.

Performing routine social media monitoring on clients is crucial while checking the transactions. Banks conduct constant transaction monitoring to locate, validate, and retain the clients' most recent information and risk profiles. The possibility that a customer may be involved in money laundering or other criminal conduct is periodically assessed with frequent surveillance, including negative media checks. The AML team can keep up with client information and identify any problems with their accounts or actions.

Reasons To Conduct Social Media Monitoring

Customers, particularly those who fall under the bank's high-risk group, run the risk of getting involved in forbidden or criminal activities. After opening a bank account and developing a relationship with the bank, a client may engage in unlawful or illegal actions.

As a result, the bank must frequently review and monitor all transactions, activities, and commercial relationships with clients. They must also do unfavorable news searches on those customers, particularly those who pose a high risk to the bank.

Such routinely unfavorable news searches may reveal a customer's actual or possible involvement in illegal or forbidden actions; as a result, the AML team and senior management of the bank conduct the necessary research and inquiry. Based on relevant unfavorable media searches and results, the risk ratings of the client may need to be revised. For example, a news story accusing the customer of fraud may raise the risk rating of that customer in the bank's records. Due to the bad news, looking into the beneficial owners is also necessary.

The banks design an acceptable risk-based approach where negative media sites and portals are identified as minimum bad news sources. They lack explicit instructions for monitoring clients against hostile media. The bank's AML team may use various unfavorable media sources to look for and detect any negative news about a particular customer.

Print media, such as newspapers, magazines, or other news sources, as well as websites or web articles that publish content relating to financial frauds, criminal activity, corruption, rackets, and so forth, as well as negative news databases maintained and made available by specialized and international organizations, are examples of the adverse media news sources.

The most typical source of unfavorable information is a person's criminal history. Authorities have even more reason to assume someone is involved in a financial crime if they learn that person has previously been detained for another crime while investigating their suspicions.

People are significantly less likely to get involved in a scheme like money laundering if they have no criminal background and are not known to connect with those who do.

What Is The Process Of Monitoring Social Media?

Setting up: The first important step is to create a legitimate project. Give all the relevant terms that will enable you to follow your interests across all social media channels.

Collecting data: If you have selected a tool, it will gather enormous amounts of data into a database. To group, remove, mark, and clean up all the mentions in the new data. You are free to use the data in any way you see fit. The accuracy and reliability of the data, however, it varies depending on the program that was used to crawl those websites.

Analyze: Do you have any analytical skills? It's unnecessary because we have many online tools to perform that work. For example, you get insights about influential power, engagements, competition level, bad reputation, sentiment, etc.