Fortunately, your board can take steps immediately to prevent social media posts and comments from portraying your nonprofit in a bad light. Plan, schedule, and publish your posts for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more with Later’s social media management platform. This may go without saying, but it’s key to create your community guidelines with your community members top of mind. When it comes to building a positive and engaging online community, setting guidelines is key. While a social media policy is designed to guide and inform, there will be times when missteps occur. The procedures for addressing policy violations are the roadmap for how you manage these slip-ups.
What Is A Corporate Social Media Policy?
The scope of your policy tells the employees to whom the policy refers. Usually, a social media policy will cover all employees, from C-suite executives to regular employees. However, sometimes, it can also include freelancers and part-time employees. With a social media policy, you can prepare employees to respond appropriately and help your company avoid an unnecessary PR disaster. Although activities like commenting or posting online might seem harmless, irresponsible online behavior from your employees’ end can hurt your company’s image.
For most companies, it helps keep social media communication consistent and avoids mistakes. But for certain organizations, like government agencies, insurance companies, and medical service providers, these policies are non-negotiable. Because they need to follow strict laws to protect private data, avoid misinformation, and stay compliant with regulations. A social media policy is a set of rules that helps your team know how to post and interact online in a way that protects your brand. Good social media policies set boundaries for how employees behave online and protect both workers and the company’s reputation. Social media guidelines are like training wheels that give employees the basic rules they can follow to learn how to connect on social media.
Social Media Policy Templates
A clear policy protects both the brand and its employees from reputational, compliance, and security risks. Keep reading to learn more and download our free, customizable social media policy template so you can start building or updating yours right away. A company’s social media guidelines should be used by anyone across the business who’s creating content for social media.
Don’t go into too much detail here – you’ll do that in later sections. Since work takes up such a large portion of our waking hours, it’s not surprising that people post about their jobs on social media. But if they do so without guidance, they may put both themselves and their employers at risk. Using this basic framework, you can create a tailored Social Media Policy that is comprehensive yet easy for employees to understand and follow. The term “Administrative Access” shall mean access to Website management tools or a Social Media Account/Profile that allows a person to modify, create, delete, or publish Content. You can’t just email a PDF out into the void and expect everyone to follow it.
Images for backgrounds, avatars, and cover photos should be in good taste and representative of the University. This requirement exists to minimize the spread of misinformation and content shared out of context. After drafting the policy, share it with the core team for feedback before finalizing it. As social media and your brand evolve, the policy will need to be revamped accordingly. In the following sections, we’ll detail what a social media policy plan should contain and why it’s a must-have for businesses navigating the digital realm. Let your employees know where they can find further training and guidance on social media best practices and remind them again of how the training may help their careers and professional brand.
Coca-Cola doesn’t have a social media policy in the traditional form, but rather “responsible social media principles” it promises to abide by. This likely could have been avoided if a social media policy had been established. Some of you may be worried that enforcing strict rules in a social media policy stifles creativity or restricts freedom of speech. Establish the rules around social media use at your organization and prevent misuse by employees.
Your social media policy should also reflect your organization’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Include guidance on using inclusive language, avoiding stereotypes, and ensuring visual content meets accessibility standards (e.g., alt text for images, captions for videos). Even posts on personal accounts can reflect back on your company if people know where your employees work. Remind employees that this rule also applies to their personal accounts. So, even if employees are just engaging on an informal social media site, their activity is still subject to company policy.
Social media guidelines for business cover everything from branding rules aimed at maintaining the brand’s reputation to legal guidance to avoid lawsuits and financial consequences. Planable is designed from the ground up with collaboration and safety in mind. Planable is a social media collaboration platform that helps marketing teams and agencies, both big and small, create, collaborate on, and publish content seamlessly and swiftly. All that without dealing with those blasted logistical issues most social media teams usually endure. Team members directly responsible for your social accounts should have a separate set of guidelines covering these issues. The reason is simple — how they handle those sensitive situations could or could not reflect badly on your company.
But, we expect you to act responsibly and ensure your productivity isn’t affected. Our free social media policy template will help you collect your thoughts into a formal document that can be downloaded as a Word document, Google doc, or PDF. Let’s break down how to create a social media policy that is right for your team and look at some examples done well. Your policy should encourage employees to share on social media in a brand-safe way.
Your social media branding guidelines should first note all your profiles. So, if your brand is also on Snapchat, Reddit or TikTok, don’t neglect them in your style guide. Think of a social media style guide as an extension of your brand guidelines. Panacea Neighborhood Pharmacy uses marketing and promotion to interact with customers through a variety of social media channels.
A social media policy template is a set of guidelines designed to help employees represent the company professionally on social media platforms. These policies are crucial for protecting the brand’s security, privacy, and legal interests. With 45% of companies lacking a social media policy, the risk of reputational damage and legal issues is significant. Your employees own their social media profiles, so what they post there can’t be restricted by your organization. As far as your own company’s social media accounts are concerned, you’re entitled to set the rules of posting. Start by ensuring that everyone involved in managing your social media accounts is familiar with the contents of the style guide.