Establishing best practices around how your company represents itself on social media – whether managed internally by your team or managed externally through an agency – can help maintain a consistent voice and protect brand reputation. Without clear guidelines in place, a minor issue could quickly snowball into negative press coverage or customer frustration, while an empowered team equipped with clear guidelines can be an immense source of power for positive change.
An effective social media policy must address all of the major areas of concern when it comes to online presence, including content, visuals and tone. You should determine what posts are allowed (or not allowed) across platforms as well as minimum language standard requirements on all of them. You’ll also want to include guidelines on how employees should deal with customer inquiries or complaints whether that involves direct messaging or calling supportline depending on nature of complaint.
Additionally, be sure to include specifics about how the brand’s colors, logo and fonts should be utilized, including any relevant hex codes. This step is crucial as it can be easy for employees to be mislead when choosing colors without clear guidelines in place. It would also be useful if your company had any image restrictions such as no smiling faces or not showing certain products on display.
Finalizing your copyright plan requires providing an overview of copyright issues and any disciplinary processes for violations, especially if your business works in highly regulated sectors such as finance or government. Your staff should understand potential pitfalls such as reposting news articles from financial websites or posting photos that have been altered using Photoshopping tools.
At the core of all social media policies lies their consequences section. Your policy should be easy for people to comprehend while remaining accessible and up-to-date.
As part of creating your social media policies, it’s beneficial to involve employees at all levels in the process. While they don’t necessarily need to attend every workshop or seminar, their input into what will go into this document that guides their own work can only help your company in the long run.
As social media policies can often be long and tedious documents, it’s essential that key points be highlighted at the outset of the document. This will enable employees to avoid skimming and familiarize themselves with guidelines before beginning use of them. You should also set an easy reminder date when reviewing or revising this policy is due.
