This article will discuss why are social media policies important to a business and what businesses need to include in their social media policies.
In today’s world, one of the most important tools you have is your social media accounts.
This is because you can communicate directly with your audience at all times, where it is more difficult to reach them directly through traditional methods such as newspapers or television.
As more and more of your clients and customers use social media, it is important to implement clear and concise social media policies that cover the activities that you and your employees are allowed to do on social media.
Social media policies
Social media policies define what you will and won’t do in terms of how you use social media.
It defines what you will and won’t post on social media. For instance, if you are a political consultant, you are not allowed to create content or post content that could be considered as directly influencing the result of an election.
Some of the activities that you are not allowed to do include:
- posting comments that could be considered discriminatory or incendiary
- posting anything that could be considered to be threatening, sexually explicit, or that could be construed as pornography
- posting content that could be considered to be racist
- any content that is considered to be in violation of any laws
- any content that contains material that could be considered hateful or threatening
- posting content that could be considered obscene
- posting content that could be considered threatening
- posting anything that could be considered slanderous or defamatory
- posting content that could be considered libelous or slanderous
- posting content that promotes physical or mental illness
Companies with any type of health or medical related positions must have social media policies in place.
For example, social media policies for nurse practitioners, physician assistants, therapists, home health aides, occupational therapists, physical therapists, etc., must define what information that employees are and are not allowed to post on social media.
A social media policy must also define what action will be taken if there is a violation of the policy.
How to create a social media policy
To create a social media policy, you need to review the policies that your competitors have and create a set of policies that is specific to your business.
Identify your objectives
At first, you need to understand your main objectives for establishing and managing your social media policy.
If you are trying to increase your number of followers or likes on your Facebook page, it would not make sense to post inappropriate content.
Remember, if you do not know what is inappropriate content, your employees will accidentally post inappropriate content.
Social media guidelines for employees must be very clear and concise. Therefore, you should provide them with guidelines before posting.
A few guidelines that may help would be:
- only discuss events that are taking place
only discuss public events - only provide updates and information about your customers and potential clients
- only post events on your business page
If you want to increase your social media presence, you should write a post that includes your goals, strategy, and specific methods to reach your goals.
If you want to improve your social media presence, write a post that includes how you will accomplish your goals. Once you have identified your goals and objectives, you can then create your social media policy.
Set goals
Since your social media policy needs to identify specific goals for your social media program, it is important to define them.
Goals are clearly defined and used to measure results and success.
Creating goals should be done in an exact manner.
What types of information do you need to be visible?
How long do you want to post on social media? How many comments are expected?
How many likes are expected? How many followers are expected?
It is also important to set specific goals for posts and comments. The goal of posting 100 comments or followers is different than the goal of 5,000 comments or followers.
It is also important to determine which social media platforms are most effective for achieving your goals.
Designate agents and reps
To keep track of how your social media accounts are doing, you should designate someone or team to manage each social media account.
For example, you should create a team of agents to monitor your Facebook page, an agent team to monitor your Twitter account, etc.
If you want to improve your social media presence, you must be able to measure the results of your social media campaigns.
This is why you must have an agent or team managing each account.
General guidelines
When setting up your social media policy, you should use general guidelines.
You can use certain things to communicate the general rules to employees and guests. For example, employees should not post personal photos or profile pictures on your corporate Facebook page.
As a rule, employees should not post information that would be considered inappropriate or controversial.
Also, employees are expected to make their posts public or private, depending on how they use the account.
