How to Create Social Media Business Guidelines

Social media policies and guidelines provide your business a framework to carry out your social media strategy and implement your social media tactics. They can also have a direct impact on the success of your social media endeavors.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to social media guidelines for all your employees and your social media management team, and for crisis management and specific platforms. I’ll also take a look at important considerations for big and small businesses.

Advantages of Social Media Guidelines

Here are four major benefits:

• Provides a way to implement your social media strategy and improve your social media performance.
• Gives everyone the information they need to work well together.
• Makes it easier to build your social communities online.
• Makes it possible to respond to emergencies before they get out of hand.

With the right strategy, social media guidelines can have a direct impact on your success.

Models to Follow

You can easily find examples of social media policies and guidelines used by big companies. Here are a few lists of social media policy resources:

• Dave Fleet has a list of 57 social media policy examples and many interesting articles on social media policies to read, as well as a free ebook to download.
• Chris Boudreaux has a database with 150 social media policies.
• Laurel Papworth lists 40 different social media staff guidelines.

As you look through these resources you’ll notice how companies have different approaches.

Here’s a look at the different types of social media guidelines:

Social Media Guidelines for Employees

Some companies feel the need to provide their employees with general guidelines on how to use social media for both their personal profiles as well as professional profiles.

These guidelines can simply be reminders of what’s considered confidential information or information that could have legal ramifications if shared on social networks in any format.

You can also read the discussion on Forrester’s decision to have their analysts blog on the company blog and not on personal blogs.

Guidelines for Your Social Media Team

The people interacting and engaging on social media can benefit greatly with guidelines adapted to your business needs.

On one hand, the people interacting on behalf of your company must:

• Be knowledgeable of various legal terms and what they mean in your business environment, such as defamation, endorsements, intellectual property, and any form of wrongful disclosure
• Be aware of global implications of your online communication
• Avoid inappropriate comments about competitors or others online

On the other hand, they must also:

• Remain positive
• Be helpful and add value
• Be transparent

And in addition to this, they are entrusted with cultivating relationships and building community on your social media profiles.

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It’s not always easy to balance all of these criteria, especially for people new to social media. And this is where good guidelines can be critical.

If you need this type of social media guide, Todd Defren’s corporate social media policy template is a good place to start.

Guidelines for Crisis Management

You might want to monitor the negative comments about your business because a crisis can grow very fast. So you’ll want to know how to respond to any social media attacks and have your action guidelines ready to respond to a negative situation before it gets out of hand.

For example one of the first places to start is to be sure your team has both social media and business expertise. You’ll also need to delegate enough resources to maintain an on-going presence on your social media sites. This will help you to implement the steps you need in crisis management.

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Once you understand how to use social media for crisis management, you’ll want to build your online presence and your:

• Social relationships in your business community
• Social media team
• Online monitoring

You’ll also want to establish clear guidelines to for a quick response. These usually include:

• Ultra-transparency
• Dialogue, as well as the right message
• A team able to provide a rapid response
• And knowing when to call in public relations professionals experienced in social media crisis management

Check out what Chris Kenton has to say on social media crisis management.

Editorial Guidelines for Specific Social Media Platforms

You can also create editorial guidelines on how to implement your social media strategy on specific platforms such as Facebook. These editorial guidelines can be very useful when you have several people contributing in one place.

Creating specific editorial guidelines can help you build stronger communities on each platform. For example, moderation might need to be handled differently. On your business blog you might opt for pre-moderation of all comments, but this is not something you’ll be able to do on all social media platforms, where you’ll have to adjust your guidelines.

An active Facebook page can have a lot of social interaction. And you may need to monitor your Facebook page more than on other social media platforms and need a small team to rotate at different times of the day. You’ll also want to incorporate more fun activities regularly on your Facebook page to encourage engagement.

Social Media Guidelines for Big Companies

While big companies almost always have existing communication policies and these guidelines also apply to social media communication, they also need to make sure they address the specific dos and don’ts.

Big companies might require both internal social media policies and external social media policies.

The question of managing social media celebrities may also be integrated into their social media guidelines.

Social Media Guidelines Adapted to Small Companies

Smaller companies may not need all of these social media policies and guidelines. For example, with fewer staff and less time available, smaller companies may decide it’s quicker to “block” people who leave inappropriate comments.

They might only need one well-crafted set of guidelines, some good judgment and an understanding of social media and their company’s online strategies.

And even if smaller companies think they don’t need social media guidelines like the bigger companies, they can benefit tremendously from one, because it will:

• Help them to stay focused on their social media strategy
• Allow them to benchmark their progress and better evaluate what to do next
• Allow them to manage the time they invest in social media better

Find the Right Social Media Guidelines for Your Business

Here are three things you can do to help you create social media guidelines for your business:

#1: Check out the social media policies and guidelines of companies similar to yours in the lists mentioned above.

#2: Listen to our expert interviews, in which many of these social media pros share the simple guidelines that work well for them.

#3: Read through the social media case studies here on Social Media Examiner to see how other companies use social media successfully.

You’ll learn more as you engage on social media and implement your first social media guidelines. So remember to seek feedback and be ready to tweak your guidelines from time to time to fit in with how your business communicates on your social networks. The social platforms change and people also change in how they communicate on them.

Want to learn about the editorial guidelines used on Social Media Examiner’s Facebook page, which helped to build a thriving community of over 15,000 fans in only a few short months?

Sign up for the Facebook Success Summit 2010 where Amy Porterfield and I share Social Media Examiner’s Editorial Guidelines for Facebook.

Now it’s your turn.

What social media policies or guidelines does your company have in place? How have they helped your business? Let us know your comments in the box below.

Photo credits : Moi Cody & Kriss Szkurlatowski

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