How to Create Social Media Guidelines

Social Media Guidelines ~ have you got yours yet?

So why do you need them?

Because your prospective, current, and former employees, customers, supporters and vendors are already hanging out on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and many others.

What are they discussing about your organisation, your employees and your workplace? What are they sharing, right now, about you, your products, prices and practices?

And perhaps, more importantly, how are your people responding?

Having Social Media Guidelines and Policies in place doesn’t mean you can totally control your organisation’s online persona. But you do get to interact responsibly in the conversation which forms your image in the mind of your audience.

You can be helped, not hindered, by all your employees.

Why wait until a casual remark becomes a PR crisis?

Social media policies are not one-size-fits-all

Social media policies and guidelines provide your enterprise with a framework to carry out your social media strategy and tactics. They have a direct impact on your ability to be successful online.

The right policy for your organisation has to reinforce your organisation’s existing corporate culture and provide practical guidance.

Let me introduce you to my 5x5x5 social media guidelines ~ The 5 Major Benefits, 5 Universal Guidelines, and 5 Tips To Help You Create Your Own.

As you read through them, remember, social media policies are for all your employees, not just your social media management team, for crisis management or any specific social network platforms.

I’ll also help you take a look at important considerations for big and small organisations and the different ways they can operate.

Advantages of Social Media Guidelines

First, there are 5 major benefits which are common to all:

• Provides a way to implement your social media strategy and improve your social media performance
• Gives everyone the information they need to work well together
• Makes it easier to build your social communities online
• Makes it possible to respond to emergencies before they get out of hand
• Creates team spirit and empowers individuals throughout the organisation

Creating the right social media strategy and communicating it clearly in your guidelines will have a direct impact on your success online.

Social Media Guidelines for all organisations

With a wide variety of enterprises that have already adapted and published their own Social Media Guidelines, it’s relatively easy to draft a working document for your organisation. Simply adapt the best and most relevant ones for your purpose.

Here are five suggestions you should consider:

• Keep it simple. Be realistic – if your guidelines are too long winded or complicated they’ll be difficult for employees to follow. Ford, for example, has just five points which are explained on one single page.
• Empower employees. Ask employees to use their best judgment. The reality is that with social media it’s in your employees hands, anyway, to do what they think is best for the customer and for the company. Headset Bros, for example, allow their employees to fix any problem, in any way, immediately that costs less than $50.
• Be careful when sharing information. Request employees to keep confidential information secret, about the company and other individuals.
• Take time before responding on social media networks. Remember the Internet is permanent and never forgets. Remind employees that perception is reality. I think that this is very important because responses will travel from your brain to your keyboard without a second thought, and once something’s ‘out there’, you can’t take it back.
• Don’t pick a fight and correct your mistakes. Understand that you’ll encounter a wide range of individuals on social media platforms. If someone is contentious, be polite and minimize contact. When an error is made, admit it and correct it. Indicate where you’ve changed a previous post or information.

Tips for your own set of Social Media Guidelines

To help your organisation gather the best of the social media guidelines, here are five recommendations. Bear in mind, in the beginning at least, this is a living document. Putting it down on paper doesn’t mean that it can’t be altered, as you learn and understand more about how it works.

Here are my five Tips for you to think about:

• Start with a draft based on a review of other companies’ guidelines. With a wide array of businesses who have adapted social media guidelines; why start from scratch? It’s much easier to edit a document than to stare at a blank sheet of paper.
• Make guidelines positive and proactive, not punitive. You want employees to embrace these principles because they’re representing your organisation, even when they’re not working.
• Keep guidelines as simple and streamlined as possible. Remember your goal is to get employees to follow them. If they’re too complex, they’ll be something that’s too difficult to remember.
• Bring a cross section of representatives together. The goal is not to make this a long extended work-in-progress with meeting after meeting. Rather, have a variety of staff present to ensure that the guidelines work across the entire organisation. This shouldn’t be a legal or HR document, depending on your corporate ethos.
• Give everyone the chance to contribute their input. The objective is to be democratic and ensure that everyone in the organisation takes ownership and responsibility for these guidelines. With broad input, specific elements which are relevant for your company will rise to the surface.

Models to Follow

Create the social media guidelines your business needs.

You can easily find examples of social media policies and guidelines used by big organisations. Here are a few different lists of social media policy resources:

Different approaches

So now you’re not short of a few examples.  And as you look through these resources you’ll notice how some companies have a very different approach.

For example, take a look at these different types of social media guidelines:

Guidelines for Employees

Guidelines for Your Social Media Team

Guidelines for Crisis Management

Guidelines for Specific Social Media Platforms

Guidelines for Big Companies

Guidelines Adapted to Small Companies

What to do next

OK, this is where we cut through the clutter and find the right social media guidelines for your organisation. Here are the three things you should do now to help you create your own social media guidelines:

1. Check out the social media policies and guidelines of companies similar to yours in the lists mentioned above.
2. Read the expert articles and interviews, in which many of these social media pros share the simple guidelines that work well for them.
3. Pull your social media marketing team together, no matter how small the team is today, and create the first draft of your own social media guidelines.

You’ll learn more as you engage on social media and implement your first social media guidelines. So remember to seek feedback and be ready to tweak your guidelines from time to time to fit in with how your organisation communicates on your social networks. The social platforms change and people also change in how they communicate too.

So what are you waiting for? Take this article and start drafting your organisation’s social media guidelines today. This is one area of social media activity that’s really a “no-brainer” for companies because it’s so vital to protect your most important corporate asset ~ your employees.

Don’t wait until you have an avoidable PR crisis.

Which elements do you think should be included in social media guidelines and why?

Please let me know what works and what doesn’t work for your organisation, so that we all learn.