You need a social media policy to establish boundaries and give guidelines for effective social media use. If your company’s employees are using social media (yes, that should be almost everyone), you may consider their personal social media use akin to a ticking time bomb. You shouldn’t. The most socially successful companies encourage their employees to express themselves naturally while promoting business objectives.
Your employees can boost your bottom line while respecting your social media policies.
Why It’s Important
In some social situations, it’s absolutely crucial that your employees take the lead. For example, the most valuable time spent on LinkedIn is in Groups, asking and answering Questions and sending messages to other LinkedIn members. Yet, those features are only available to individual accounts. If you really want to harness the power of LinkedIn for your company, you need to train, encourage and set guidelines for your employees so they can maximize results and grow their business network.
In other cases, it’s important to set more rigid boundaries to reduce the chance of unfortunate situations and insensitive employee communications. For instance, your company may have slightly difficult but very valuable clients and client-facing employees may get tired of dealing with them sometimes. But if they head over to Twitter and complain about them by name, the clients may find out and defect to a competitor. Many clients monitor social media for their name and if they catch wind of nasty comments they are likely to become upset and may respond. This kind of scenario can escalate and end profitable relationships.
Do you see why you NEED a social media policy?
What To Include in Your Social Media Policy
- Privacy Rules – This may seem like common sense, but it’s incredibly important. Reinforce that employees should only share information about the company that is already public. If you’re in an industry where client confidentiality is paramount, like a doctor’s office or law office, there may strict privacy rules dictated by law.
- Account Monitoring – Let your employees know if you plan to monitor their presence online. (It’s not recommended to start asking for Facebook passwords.)
- Suggested Behavior – Determine how you would like to see employees act and share best practices with them. Here are a few ideas: be yourself, be truthful, admit mistakes when you make them, be respectful of others and thoughtful about what you share.
- Relationship Disclosure - Should an employee designate their employment with your company in their social media profiles? Would you like them to help distribute the educational content you create? If the answer is yes, should they also be required to display their employment relationship with your company?
Example of a Good Social Media Policy
If you want to see a clear social media policy that encourages employees to act naturally and add value to online conversations, check out IBM’s policy.
Here’s a snippet that hopefully gives you inspiration to create your own policy:
Social media policies are important to help employees understand what they can and cannot do on social networks. Be wary of getting too strict in your social media policy; a more permissive social media policy will encourage your employees to share the good word about your business in the most authentic, effective way possible. Does your company have a social media policy in place? Need help crafting one? Let us know in the comments below or contact us here. If you liked this post, please subscribe to our weekly e-mail newsletter!
Mary is Co-Founder of SalesBlend and works closely with clients to help them use digital marketing to achieve measurable business results. Follow Mary on Twitter @MaryVChevalier.
About Mary Chevalier
