Grimes County is focusing in on archiving their social media interactions and posts.
During the most recent Commissioner’s Court meeting, IT Director Greg Cannon presented a deal to purchase ArchiveSocial software for the purposes of keeping all the county’s social media interactions, which the main social media sites do not store.
He noted that it is a state law that counties now have to keep those.
“We have to be able to produce record that have even been deleted. So, for example, if someone in the county gets irate at one of these meetings, posts some stuff on social media, then decides to delete it two minutes later, we have to be able to produce that record. Today, there is no way internally of us capturing those records, unless we had someone sitting on the site taking screenshots every thirty seconds, so we could see what was going on 24/7,” said Cannon.
The contract would cost around $4,7000 annually, and allows the county to archive 3,000 posts.
That will cover up to ten accounts, with prices increasing with each additional one after ten. But, the price does not go down for less accounts.
There was discussion on how many accounts each department has, and how all of this would be regulated so that the software does not ultimately become a budgetary issue.
“There would have to be a county policy that says because this will cause us money now, that if you are opening Twitter or Facebook accounts, it adds budgetary constraints. A policy from Commissioners saying you cannot have a Facebook page for your department, unless approved by a Commissioner,” Cannon said.
The commissioners approved that contract with ArchiveSocial, which will archive the county’s social media interactions.
