Independent broker-dealer LPL Financial reportedly has compliance systems in place to enable its sales force to use the social media sites.  The firm, according to vendor Erado Message Control Solutions, started using the Erado system in May to track and archive advisers' use of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

“Our partnership with Erado is an effective way of meeting rising demand from advisers for social-media compliance services.  At the same time, this fits within our broader strategy of seamlessly bringing together leading solutions that are reliable, simple to operate and fully integrated on our proprietary technology platform.”  -- LPL spokesperson.

Erado CEO Craig Brauff said that his company's system integrates with LPL's existing surveillance infrastructure - by allowing B/D's and RIA's to continue using their pre-existing reporting tools for e-mail and other archiving.  Mr. Brauff also noted that the Erado solution is not proxy-based.  As a broker-dealer or organization with thousands of advisers, managing the multitude of social-media-capable devices becomes virtually impossible and extremely expensive. This dramatically increases the risk associated with social-media content capture and allows a broker-dealer to defend social-media policy.”

Commonwealth Financial Network earlier in June began to support its advisers' use of interactive social-media marketing - including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs.  That includes being able to use the 3 social-media services to create posts and comment or provide status updates, as well as respond to others and click “like” or similar buttons and re-tweet.  Commonwealth also contracted with Erado.   [InvestmentNews, 6/22/11]