If your business or agency or doesn’t yet have a social media policy, it’s time to build one. Here are tips to make your policy ironclad.
Creating an official social media policy is always a good idea. If there is more than one person on your team involved in your social media accounts, such a policy is essential.
Discussions about creating a social media policy often focus on preventing major social media fails. Granted, failures like this can hurt a company image in drastic (and sometimes irreparable) ways. But a good social media policy will go beyond simply preventing disaster.
Reasons to invest the time in creating one include:
Improving company productivity
Increasing conversion from your content
Coordinating communication between members of your team
Ensuring your branding is consistent
Communicating clear expectations within your team
Setting your business apart from the competition
Responding more efficiently and effectively to customers through social media
Consistent social media that employs an excellent social media policy leads to measurable results in your company’s revenue. Even if you are a solopreneur, putting thought into a social media policy will help you to think through your brand in an intentional way and to be ready to hire when the time comes.
Let’s talk about some important considerations here.
Related Post: Social Media Marketing 101
Who Are the Stakeholders in Your Social Media Policy?
Before you can create a social media policy, think about who should be involved in the conversation. Who should have a seat at the table? Who is the final decision maker?
Often, a policy is created in boardrooms and executive meetings. Or even behind closed doors with a legal team. Though doing so may help in a lawsuit or look good on paper, it will do nothing to create a space where amazing social media can happen.
If you want all the benefits of a social media policy, it needs to connect directly with the people implementing it.
Questions to consider
Before you write a solid social media policy, you need to first take the time to understand the perspectives and needs of its stakeholders.
For example:
Who are the people that will be doing social media every day? Do you have a single department for this? Are the people who do social media also responsible for other tasks?
What other departments may intersect with social media campaigns?
For example:
Marketing teams outside of social
Salespeople/account managers
Customer service
Graphics and design teams
Website creation/management team
What other departments have information that may be useful to social media?
For example:
Product development may be able to share sneak peeks of new products.
Quality control might be able to give a heads up of possible consumer concerns.
Executive departments can help set the direction of the overall communication.
Human Resources could share when hiring or how the company honors employees.
As you can see, even if social media is its own department, it connects with virtually every part of a business.
Anyone who has ever planned a large meeting knows that it can sometimes stop work from getting done when too many voices are talking at once. So, you might want to consider other methods of collecting information.
Once you know who is involved (or should be involved) in social media policy, you can choose from a lot of ways to gather their input, such as:
Send out a survey
Have someone on the social media team interview them to get their feedback
Create smaller workgroups for each piece of the social media policy
Components of a Social Media Policy
Now that you have input from all your internal stakeholders, how do you create a policy that works?
Some key components that every social media policy should have include:
Who has what permissions on social media?
How will everyone stay up to date on changes?
What are your branding and voice guidelines?
Where will you build a social media presence and how will you evaluate new opportunities?
How will you measure your success and improve your processes?
What will you do in the event of an emergency?
What tools will you use to manage your social media?
Which information is confidential and what should be shared?
You may find that you need to add additional sections for your own unique organization and goals.
Taking the time now to create a policy will avoid hours of lost time later when employees struggle to find guidelines, make decisions, and take action.
Who Has Permission for What?
Just because someone has a saved seat in the car for your road trip does not mean the person should be given the keys to drive. The same is true on social media.
Though you do want the input of all parts of your business in your social media policy planning, you don’t want every person in the company to have the Twitter password.
On each platform know what your options are for administrative access. Use your social media policy to clearly delineate what permissions are appropriate for each person on your social media team.
For example, on Facebook, permissions range from an “Analyst” who can only view statistics, to an “Admin” who has full access and can add other administrators. An “Admin” can even delete the whole page.
Find out what each person on the social media team needs to do their job well … then fit their access accordingly. This step alone can solve a multitude of problems.
(By the way, Agorapulse allows users to get even more specific with page roles with the power to create custom roles, custom permissions, and assignments for all your team members.)
You can also use a tool like Agorapulse to add additional team members who can add a post and assign it to part of the social media team for approval.
This can be especially helpful if you have several locations or remote team members. They may be able to snap a picture of something that would make a great social media post. Rather than this getting lost in endless emails, it can go directly into the social media queue while leaving final creative control with the team managing the social media directly.
On the other hand, a social media platform like Twitter only has a single username and password access point. It is no wonder so many problems happen on this platform when a social media policy is not put in place.
How Is Social Media Training Managed?
Important as social media training for new employees is ongoing training for your staff to keep them up to date.
Make sure your training includes information about new aspects of social media itself. Employees need to understand the nuances and best practices of each individual platform (like correct use of hashtags) but also think outside the social media box.
For example, when your company does sensitivity training or sexual harassment training, ask if it has a social media component. If not, add it.
Do you have expectations for employees about how they manage their personal social media accounts? That may seem like it is outside the bounds of what is appropriate because employees may list their job on their personal social media … But this can still result in unwanted attention to you and your business if they post something inappropriate.
Definitely involve Human Resources in this part of the conversation!
What Are Your Branding and Voice Guidelines?
Building your own unique brand and voice on social media is a constant effort. And it can be undermined by the careless use of social media.
Don’t make your team guess about what they should do. Cover this in-depth in your social media policy. Some questions that you should provide answers to are:
How should your social media team source its images?
How and when should your business name and logo be used?
What are your brand colors? What complementary colors are good to use?
What font family should your social media posts use?
How should quotes be attributed? What due diligence should be done about sourcing quotes and other outside material?
When and how are emojis or informal speech allowed?
What slang terms are OK (or not OK) to use?
Who is the intended audience for your social media? How does that impact your content?
Do employees need to sign off with their name when they respond to comments or messages?
Should social media posts primarily use photos, non-photo images, or a combination of both?
When does the branding team need to be involved?
Who is responsible for regular audits of your social media to keep the branding up to date?
Providing clear guidelines in this area will help provide continuity to your social media even as individual staff members move around or change.
What Tools Can You Use to Improve Internal Communication?
One of the most important ways to turn social media fans into customers is to respond quickly and with the information they need.
With multiple social media accounts and several people managing all the activity, too often things can get missed. An important part of any successful social media strategy should be to determine the process for making sure the right person sees the right messages. This can be the difference between gaining a loyal customer and losing a sale.
Don’t leave this piece to chance.
Take advantage of technology to help improve communication inside the team. For example, Agorapulse allows you to assign any message in your account (whether that be a direct message, or simply a mention or search result) to any manager on your team. You can even include a comment, giving you the chance to pass on an idea, question, or reminder.
Who Will Track Results and Make Recommendations?
Finally, build into your social media policy a system of review and updates. You don’t want to discover that an employee fired three months ago still has the rights to delete your Facebook page after the fact.
The key parts of a review are:
Tracking results from social media efforts compared to goals
Making sure that permissions and responsibilities are up to date
Branding is up to date and social media accounts are updated with new features
Adjustments are made to improve conversion and performance
Again, using tools will help with this considerably. A good place to start is the reports section in Agorapulse that will allow you to do a deep dive into your social media results. Make sure one person is assigned to reviewing and distributing the reports on a regular basis, along with checking users and permissions.
Want more helpful, actionable content like this? Subscribe to the Agorapulse blog newsletter, and get the most recent blog posts, freebies, and news about the social media channels you use most.
Read more: agorapulse.com
