A brand’s exposure on social media can be a double-edged sword. On the positive side, businesses use social channels to build brand awareness, connect with their target audience, and acquire new customers. However, any misuse of the channels can severely dent the company’s image and reputation, thereby affecting its business potential.
Hence, a comprehensive social media policy with well-defined guidelines and best practices helps the business to protect and build its brand equity. Without a clear policy, you run multiple risks that can range from slight damage to your brand from posting out of touch content to being hit with a lawsuit for defamation.
A social media policy is the code of conduct for your business and its internal stakeholders (your employees), for posting and interacting on social media. It’s a dynamic document with easy-to-understand guidelines, that responds to changes in the social environment.
The policy will protect your brand image and prevent disruptions to your social media marketing efforts. Let’s look at seven elements of a robust and comprehensive social media policy.
A social media governance policy that demarcates the boundary between personal and professional use of social media, with clear do’s and don’ts when posting on the company’s behalf, can prevent a myriad of issues from damaging your brand.
Take the example of Avvo Corp, a Seattle-based online directory for lawyers and physicians. After hiring a slew of digital-savvy marketers, Avvo’s presence on social channels was boosted – however some of the content posted was unprofessional and reflected poorly on the firm.
While the brand was getting tons of exposure, the imaging and messaging driving said exposure was not aligned with the brand. That was the trigger point for Avvo to craft a clearly defined social media policy for its employees, with clear guidelines for tone and voice in addition to content.
Brand equity is how your customers view and value your brand. For a brand, its equity is its most prized asset, and brands will go to any length to protect their reputation. That means defining strict guidelines for your employees when posting on behalf of your company and brand on social channels.
Some points to include in your social media policy to protect your brand equity include:
While a lot of this may sound like common sense, sometimes it’s best to just spell things out.
A robust social media policy defines who can post and interact on the social channels while using the company account. A spokesperson however, is someone who is approved to speak on behalf of the organization – i.e answer and field questions from the press. This distinction is important – social media policies define who can post on social channels, but they do not allow people posting social media content the ability to issue statements on behalf of the company.
Daniel Larsson, Head of Marketing at Right Inbox, recommends that brands designate an official spokesperson or spokespeople to reduce confusion or conflicting instruction. A good social media policy should outline the circumstances and types of content where social managers should refer to the designated spokesperson or communications team to gain clearance or direction.
This spokesperson should have the final say on what is appropriate to post and what isn’t.
It is important to sensitize and educate your employees about possible blowback from potential legal issues. Chris Boudreaux, a senior vice president at New York-based social-media consulting firm Converseon, cites the example of a New Jersey restaurant to validate this point.
The restaurant tripped up when its manager fired an employee who had posted derogatory remarks about the restaurant on their private social page. The manager had secretly gained access to the employee’s private page, without authorization. The employee sued the restaurant and received a five-figure settlement.
Protecting your organization from legal blowback is a complex, cross-functional process that without a doubt will involve social teams as content posted on branded pages always presents a potential liability for companies. Thus, a good social media policy should have at the bare minimum the clearance of a legal team, but ideally should be crafted with their input in mind.
The law mandates that anyone using social media for company-related activities must disclose their identity. The guidelines in your social media policy must clearly define the brand style so that all communications, be it voice, text, or visuals, are “on brand” in terms of both content and style.
However, sometimes the topic at hand may require the employee to share their opinion. In all such cases, the employee must preface their comment with the declaration, “this is my personal opinion”. In case of a conflict between brand opinion and the employee’s opinion, the employee should go with the brand opinion or refrain from commenting.
Employees empowered with the right training and tools can add value to their company’s marketing efforts. The employees can use social channels not just as a means to communicate information, but as a core part of an effective marketing and brand awareness strategy.
The following best practices are useful when training your employees:
Every new employee must receive social media training as part of their onboarding process.
Now that you have an understanding of what the scope of a good social media policy should be and why it’s so important to have one in place, let’s go over some real examples from major brands:
Intel’s social media policy document immediately highlights three clear rules for employees to follow when posting on social channels:
These three practices are likely to be present in the social media guidelines for most brands. The rest of the document reviews more specific examples to help employees make the correct judgement calls in more subjective situations.
As a major retail brand with thousands of employees, Best Buy’s social media policy is a good example to look at for consumer facing brands with a significant retail presence, and thus a significant number of personal social media accounts owned by employees. Here are the immediately highlighted rules:
Worth noting is the last point – specifically stating that employees who post content that demonstrate a lack of alignment with Best Buy’s values regarding discrimination and equality can be terminated.
Coca-Cola has one of the longer social media governance documents you’ll find for a brand. While the scope and thoroughness of the document is most definitely not lacking, the length of the document and lack of a concise initial summary of its contents could mean that employees or representatives don’t read or process the rules established by the policy. In comparison to Intel’s social media policy, Coke’s social governance document could be far more organized, and desperately needs an initial summary of guidelines.
A social media policy is not about putting undue restrictions on your employees, it’s about helping your brand succeed in the social media space.
The key is to keep your social media policy simple and easy to understand. The policy and its implementation enable your employees to properly represent your brand online.
With the right guidance and training, and a dynamic policy that evolves with time, you can empower employees to use social media responsibly and in a way that adds the most value and consistency to your brand.
Owen Jones is the Senior Content Marketer at ZoomShift, an online schedule maker app. He is an experienced SaaS marketer, specializing in content marketing, CRO, and Facebook advertising. He likes to share his knowledge with others to help them increase results.