Answers to your questions
Social Media Check has been designed specifically for individuals, ensuring personal 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.
The cost of buying a report is £19.99 and can be purchased quickly and easily. You can buy the report for yourself or another individual (e.g. son/daughter) or as a gift for a friend.
You can buy your report quickly and easily here today.
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. If it takes 10 seconds to manually check each post it could take someone days to review a whole online history.
Social Media Check can do this in under 30 minutes with no issue around unconscious bias or human error. All you need to do is purchase the report, tick the social media platforms you want checking, then sit back and wait for the report to arrive in your inbox.
Yes, you can buy a report for someone else. This option is available to you when you go through the report buying process.
As a parent/guardian, it is useful buying a report for your child to protect their online reputation. In particular, before they apply for further education or at a time when they’re thinking about their first job or summer employment.
Social Media Check reports shouldn’t be considered a Pass / Fail exercise. Many prospective employers within the UK use our services to assist in evaluating candidate employment applications.
Social media check reports are never used to make direct hiring decisions. The more likely scenario is that a prospective employer may share a report that they have purchased with the candidate detailing any content that they have issue with. It would then be up to the candidate to moderate/delete the content or decline the opportunity to progress further in the shortlisting process.
The 6 main social media platforms that are checked include Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flickr, Medium and Tumblr.
Each social media platform is checked against the ten key 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.
The time taken for a report to be generated depends on the number of social media platforms analysed and the number of posts needed to be reviewed.
A check conducted for an individual with accounts on the most popular social media platforms, with an average number of posts, will take between 15 and 30 minutes to complete once consent has been received.
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.
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 7 classifiers (e.g. swearing and profanity, hate speech, potential nudity) 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.
The Social Media Check that you pay for will only be returned to you. If you choose to share this output with a prospective employer that is entirely up to you. In certain scenarios (i.e. applying for work in sensitive care settings, working with vulnerable young adults, or working with children) the fact that you have a clean Social Media Check is likely to strengthen your application.
Yes, employers throughout the UK may well ask you to participate in a Social Media Check before short-listing you for a position or indeed offering you a job.
Certain employment scenarios (i.e. applying for work in sensitive care settings, working with vulnerable young adults, or working with children) are much more likely to ask you to participate in a check than others.
Yes. There’s no limit on the number of times you can buy a report for personal use. Many customers buy secondary reports if their first report contained findings that don’t reflect the point of view or values of the individual today.
In this scenario customers would work through their initial report, clicking the findings and moderating or deleting the content that they wish to remove. A second report may be purchased to ensure that the content that has been updated or deleted is correct within the second Social Media Check report.
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.
No, Social Media Check does not require your passwords at any time. The process is fully automated and uses OAuth which stands for Open Authorisation.
Open Authorisation allows third-party services, like Social Media Check, to exchange your information without having to give away your password.
More information regarding OAuth 2.0 can be found here https://auth0.com/docs/authenticate/protocols/oauth
You can be reassured that your accounts are fully secure, using internationally accredited and approved development standards, and there is no need to change your passwords after the check is complete.
No, undergoing a social media check is for your reference only and the process is confidential and 100% secure. The final report is delivered to your chosen inbox. It is then up to you to decide how you would like to share this information.
What our customers are saying
Our role is to protect and support our clients. We feel confident that with Social Media Checks service in place we now have that added level of security, ensuring that we are bringing the right people to The Maggie Oliver Foundation.
Maggie Oliver, The Maggie oliver foundation
Social Media Check have supported NYAS by enhancing our safer recruitment process through providing additional checks on top of the usual reference and enhanced DBS checks. This additional element of our recruitment process has added real value for NYAS as well as providing an extra layer of reassurance.
I would have no hesitation in recommending the services of Ben Hart and his team at Social Media Check for any organisation involved in recruiting, but especially any organisations involved with providing a front line service to children, young people and vulnerable adults. The work they do should be a standard requirement of all recruitment drives.
Rita Waters GCE, National Youth Advocacy Service
This is an approach that everyone who has ever used social media should consider.
Nick Robinson Chairman, The Isthmian League
The output report is the best we have seen in the market. It clearly identifies the social platforms that have been checked and provides links to any offensive posts within the report.
This has been critical to allowing the end-user to clean up their accounts quickly and easily.
Recruitment Agency, Cheshire.
The fact that Social Media Check obtains full consent for every platform means that my reports contain both public and private post findings.
This was a key requirement for us when looking at our sensitive end-user accounts.
Trusted Customer.
It’s easy to forget what I posted in my teens and I was shocked at what the report found, it certainly doesn’t represent me now! Happily with one click those comments and posts are gone for good and I can be confident of my online profile thanks to Social Media Check.
Olivia Cooper