6 Tips to Help You Create a Social Media Policy for Employees

By: Guest Author on January 17, 2013 @ 11:42 am.

The Internet provides many risks to your business. If you’re not active, you can lose rankings if your search engine optimization is not always on point. If you don’t monitor what’s being said about your company, a customer can do a great deal of damage to your brand with one bad online review. Or you may somehow fall victim to a social media scandal.

Many businesses are using social media as a marketing strategy, but some companies are making the mistake of launching a social media account without first creating a policy for their employees.

Creating a policy can help your employees understand how they’re allowed to use social media in the workplace, who handles any social media situations and what types of actions are considered acceptable. Providing this information to your employees will make them aware of the rules and guidelines, and it will also protect you in case any employee decides to go against the policy.

Since social media is still a new concept to some businesses, most don’t know how to create a social media policy. The following six tips will help.

1. Create a team.

Using a team approach to create your policy is the safest way to make sure that any and all information gets included. Make sure that the CEO as well as members from HR, marketing, and IT and a legal representative are all involved. Each individual can provide relevant and useful information to what needs to be included in the policy.

2. Share the basic information.

Make sure that your policy clearly states the goal of the social media campaign, who is in charge of social media, how you will track ROI and who has the authority to use the company’s social media account. Don’t think that any information is too irrelevant to place in the policy.

3. Know the law.

Some companies use their policies to tell employees what they specifically can and cannot do on their own personal accounts, but the National Labor Relations Review Board has laws that protect an employee’s right to use their personal account for labor relations. This means that your employees can openly talk about your business on social media with other employees, and you can’t do anything about it. If you try to tell your employees what they cannot post on their own personal accounts, you could be breaking the law.

4. Discuss general policies.

Use your policy to discuss social media as a whole. Let your employees know how you plan to use any social media channels and let them know what you expect from them on any social media channels.

5. Be site specific.

After you have generalized your guidelines, you should spell out specific guidelines for each specific social media site that you use. Let your employees know what you encourage them to share or how you’d like for them to use the site. While you need to be careful what you tell them, you should still encourage certain usage and let them know how to handle certain social media situations.

6. Have it reviewed by a legal professional.

Once you have the policy written, make sure you have it reviewed by a lawyer. This way, they can tell you if you are missing any pertinent information or if you need to make any changes to keep you legally covered.

Though social media policies may seem a bit unnecessary at first, they provide great guidelines for your employees and serve as a legal document for your business in the event that any scandal or misuse of your company’s account arises.

This and many other educational articles helping web professionals understand the challenges of the web have been prepared for you by Caleb Grant thanks to SEOMap the keyword strategy experts.

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