When it comes to utilizing social media for your business, it’s important that your employees, who likely will be posting on the business’ behalf, have clear guidelines as to how they should be posting. Although social media platforms have been well-established at this point, like other technologies, they will continue to evolve. This means that you will need to ensure that your social media policies have room to grow as well.
The following 3 tips can help you develop a strong social media posting policy for your employees.
1. Have clear expectations for your social media policies
Before allowing employees to use their social media platforms to post about your business, you should develop guidelines for posting. Some social media posting policies you should consider for your employees include:
- Using common sense before posting
- Sharing posts properly
- Creating posts that will be effective for your business
- Identifying where they should share posts
2. Ensure you’re allowing for employee advocacy generation
The social media policy you develop for your business should allow for the generation of employee advocacy. The biggest reason for doing this is that your employees are representatives of your brand when they are outside of work on their own social media channels.
Therefore, it’s necessary for them to develop the skills they need for handling any issue that comes up on their channels without it negatively affecting your business.
While you may be thinking that you could simply enforce a policy keeping your employees from mixing your business’ social media with their own, consider the low-cost promotions you’d be missing out on. By having your employees share your business’ promotions and announcements on their own social media, you’ll be able to reach a greater audience without having to pay for it.
That said, you need to have practices in place that ensure your employees act as proper brand ambassadors.
3. Have a plan in place for compliance and security protocols
Most states have laws in place for ensuring that businesses comply with regulations for confidentiality, copyrights and privacy. When companies handle sensitive customer information (like credit/debit card numbers or Social Security numbers), they will have to ensure confidentiality by holding their employees to a code of conduct.
Additionally, confidentially can come into play if a B2B customer is mentioned on social media without consulting them first. In order to ensure you’re safe to do so, it’s a good idea to check with your legal department before making such posts.
Other security issues include planning for:
- Errors (human and computer)
- False accounts
- Hackers
- Phishing and scams
You can also combat security issues by ensuring that your employees follow the guidelines set for passwords (how strong to make them and when they should be updated) and for installing security software.
It’s also a good idea to keep the number of people with access to your business accounts to a minimum.
