When other collections efforts fall short, recovering collateral or repossessing leased and purchased property may be the final option creditors have for redress. While asset recovery has been part of the collections industry for generations, the rise of social media has the potential to revolutionize this phase of collections.
Why? Because social media users often injudiciously reveal much of their lives in public posts. Those posts may be used to empower collections efforts by increasing contact rates, if the tools at a collections team’s disposal are capable of locating a debtor’s social media presence.
Social Media’s Reach Makes It a Rich Source of Data
As of January 2024, an estimated 331.1 million Americans use the internet, and of that number 229 million (approximately 70 percent) use social media. Breaking that down further, individual sites show varying degrees of market penetration. Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are among the heavyweights, used by 68 and 47 percent of Americans respectively. TikTok sits at a robust 33 percent (largely skewing to younger users), and 83 percent of Americans use YouTube.
The importance of this, from a collections perspective, is the role that social media plays in consumers’ lives. The popular social media platforms have become America’s collective diary, its personal archive, and its national clearinghouse for what used to be called “water cooler gossip.”
In short, it’s where people discuss what’s on their minds, what they’re doing, and what’s going on in their lives. For collections professionals, that represents a wealth of insight that can help speed collections and recoveries.
Users Post Incautiously on Social Media
There are ethical and legal constraints around the use of social media in collections, which was only given the stamp of approval as a collections channel by updates to the FDCPA in 2021. One of the most crucial is that a debtor’s information can only be used if it is posted publicly (we’ll return to this below). This is not as much of a hindrance as might be expected: many social media users are remarkably candid in what they post and make minimal efforts to understand platform privacy settings.
Social media users are often criticized for using the platforms to push a “curated” view of their lives, filtered to show them in a good light. Yet many are surprisingly unfiltered, even to the extent of boastfully posting about outright criminality. That same lack of caution extends to posts about their own financial situation, whether that comes in the form of bemoaning their lack of funds or gloating about stonewalling collections efforts.
Similarly, a high percentage of users have minimal knowledge of platforms’ privacy settings and make little use of them. Recent figures from Pew Research report that the likelihood of users changing their privacy settings ranges from a low of 56 percent to a high of 83 percent, based on how knowledgeable those users are.
Users Make Poor Use of Social Media Privacy Settings
Those figures, viewed in isolation, still speak to large numbers of people leaving their online activity viewable to anyone. One recent survey showed that over 40 percent of Facebook and Instagram users, for example, allow their posts to be publicly viewable by default.
Even those users who limit their posts’ viewability to some degree may overlook additional key settings. Many, for example, may not realize that they’re sharing their current location in their posts and photos. Other settings may permit friends and family members to “tag” a user in their own posts, photos, and physical check-ins at a given location.
In short, although most platforms make privacy settings available, users’ uptake remains spotty and inconsistent. This, in conjunction with the previously discussed tendency to post unnecessarily revealing information on social media, makes the various social media platforms a potential source of useful intelligence for skip tracing purposes.
Using Social Media in Asset Recovery Requires the Right Toolset
There is a broad gulf between recognizing social media’s collections potential, and actually harnessing social media for asset recovery. Challenges to its effective use include:
- The sheer number of social platforms, as well as the time and labor required to comb them for a specific debtor.
- The difficulty of differentiating between the debtor in question and others with the same or similar names.
- The limited and varied search tools provided by each platform, and the difficulty of mastering them all.
- The limited ability of Google, Bing, and other mainstream search engines to find social accounts.
- The reality that many social platforms allow anonymous or pseudonymous accounts, and those requiring real names and identification put little effort into verifying identities.
Overcoming those challenges, and turning social media’s potential into actionable intelligence, requires powerful software tools that can aggregate and analyze social media data quickly and cost-effectively.
Spokeo for Business offers that exact set of powerful search tools, capable of addressing these challenges and making social media a vital part of your collections process. Spokeo was founded initially as a social media aggregator, and although the company’s focus has expanded over time, it retains its breadth of expertise in social media.
How Spokeo for Business Can Empower Asset Collection
Spokeo’s powerful search tools can address all of the challenges or “pain points” that come with social media in asset recovery. What Spokeo for Business provides:
- Spokeo searches 120+ separate social platforms, including many that would not necessarily be thought of as social media but function that way.
- A Spokeo search draws on 12 billion individual data points, drawn from thousands of government and open-source data sources, not just social media sites. Searches usually return enough information to differentiate between the debtor and others of the same or similar names, even when those names and other personal attributes (age, geographic location, middle name) are very similar.
- Using Spokeo, rather than on-platform search tools or broad internet search engines, enables collections agents to search across all 120+ platforms at once, from a single, intuitive interface.
- Spokeo can link anonymous or pseudonymous social accounts back to the phone or email address that was used in creating them, providing additional avenues for contact.
- Spokeo’s search results often include links to likely family members. Clicking through those links to perform follow-up searches can verify those connections. Viewing the debtor’s social accounts, interactions, and a potential spouse’s page can help identify others, who in turn can then be searched through Spokeo for Business. Those individuals can ultimately be contacted to find the whereabouts of a hard-to-contact debtor (be mindful not to make a third party disclosure, though).
No search tool can guarantee a 100 percent success rate, but if a debtor is active on social media Spokeo searches can frequently locate them. On average, among those who are associated with social media activity, a Spokeo search returns accounts on seven distinct platforms.
Examples: How Spokeo Searches can Streamline Asset Recovery
Asset recovery is a foundational aspect of the collections industry. Aside from traditional secured loans and high-interest lease-to-own operations, newer Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options have increased sharply in popularity since the beginning of the decade. Consumer advocates have argued that BNPL programs encourage consumers to overextend themselves. Often, recovery of the purchased items is the only practical form of redress.
Let’s look at some of the ways social media can be utilized, through Spokeo for Business, to empower asset recovery.
Locating a Vehicle for Repossession
Social media posts by the debtor or the debtor’s friends and family may include geo-tagged photos of the vehicle, information about where the debtor is living (and presumably parking), or check-ins at a specific physical location. Together, this self-reported datacan enable collections professionals to recover the vehicle, even if its presence at a given location (a restaurant, a workplace, a street festival) is time-constrained.
Identifying Where a Debtor Currently Lives
A debtor who has moved may not have a new permanent address, or may have chosen to obfuscate it in order to evade collections efforts. When a direct Spokeo search doesn’t uncover a current address, searching the debtor’s social media posts (and their mentions on the posts of friends and family) can often turn up self-reported evidence of their current location, even if those living arrangements are transient in nature. The debtor’s possessions, including the asset slated for recovery, will often be found at the same location or identifiable in social media photos.
Identifying Alternative Storage Locations for Assets
Debtors in uncertain housing situations may be forced to find other storage options for their belongings. Those might include, among other options, commercial self-storage spaces or a friend’s or relative’s garage. Whether items are stored there from simple necessity, or in an attempt at evading recovery, mentions on social media of pulling belongings from storage can help lead collections agents to their location.
Tracking Down a Sole Proprietor’s Assets
Self-employed people, and those operating small businesses as sole proprietorships, often must acquire specific pieces of equipment in order to carry out their businesses. Social media often plays a crucial role in marketing and promoting those small enterprises, and a Spokeo search will typically lead not only to the entrepreneur’s personal accounts, but also business accounts associated with the entrepreneur. Posts on those accounts often reveal the self-employed person’s current jobsite, or a location where equipment is stored between jobs, making it possible for those assets to be successfully recovered.
Leveraging Social Media to Establish Contact with Debtors
Aside from its potential to help locate assets for recovery, Spokeo’s social media search capabilities can aid in establishing contact with debtors. By providing a set of regulatory guardrails, Regulation F opened the door to expanded use of social media and other electronic forms of communications by collections professionals.
There are constraints around the use of social media. Any collections personnel making contact through that medium must clearly identify themselves and the company they represent, for example, and cannot use deception to “friend” a debtor in order to gain broader access to their posts. As stated above, only information shared publicly may be used.
However, research by McKinsey indicates that many debtors actually prefer to be contacted through digital media rather than traditional phone calls or letters. Conducting searches through Spokeo for Business can help collections professionals locate a debtor’s social media accounts, determine which platforms the debtor actually uses, and then initiate contact through private messaging (under Regulation F, only private messaging is acceptable for discussing debt and repayment options). The debtor may ultimately opt out of further communications through that channel, but Spokeo searches also reveal phone numbers and email addresses that can be used as additional methods of contact.
The Tool for the Job
Social media represents a potentially game-changing source of information for asset collections, but only when it can be managed cost- and time-effectively by an appropriate data collection and analysis tool.
For a more detailed understanding of how Spokeo for Business can help your operation with asset recovery, reach out to our team through the contact information on our Skip Tracing and Collections page. They’ll be happy to answer your questions, arrange a demonstration of the product, or set up a no-cost trial so your team can evaluate Spokeo for Business in a hands-on setting.
Sources
Statista: Number of Internet and Social Media Users in the United States as of January 2024
Pew Research: Americans’ Social Media Use
Pew Research: Social Media Fact Sheet
Police 1: Motorcyclist Accused of Fleeing Tennessee Deputies Arrested After Posting Video on Social Media
Pew Research: How Americans View Data Privacy: 3. A Deep Dive Into Online Privacy Choices
Viasat Savings: Are More People Public or Private on Social Media?
Facebook Privacy Center: Learn How to Manage Your Location
Consumer Reports: Buy Now, Pay Later: Policy Measures to Mitigate Consumer Risks from Evolving Business Practices
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 12 CFR Part 1006 – Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (Regulation F)