For instance, a physician’s assistant student was recently called out on X (formerly Twitter). The student was posting patients’ radiographs and other confidential images on social media. For example, Dell’s rules for tasking a specific person with social media responsibilities are mentioned in the image above. You can also go for specific tools such as markup and annotation software  that help you and your team members to manage your content efficiently. Moreover, include the specific words that you find appropriate for calling your customers to take action or make a purchase from your brand.

Formalizing this in a style guide will keep everyone on the same page and create cohesion. Be as detailed as you’d like here, depending on your brand’s preferences. If you already have a grammar handbook for your website or blog, you could carry many of the same rules to your social media style guide.

We’ve talked a lot about words, but you also need to define your brand’s visual look and feel for social media. If the pronunciation of your brand name or products is unclear from the spelling, consider creating a pronunciation key. This can be as simple as including the phonetic spelling next to the word itself.

Social Media Guidelines

However, social media guidelines ensure that social media does not harm your employees, but that it, instead, helps you use its power to strengthen your brand positioning. There are many more benefits of social media guidelines for your employees. Your social media policy should be part of your employee handbook or live inside your policy database (e.g. in your HRIS). Make sure all employees have read it, especially those in your social media team.

Identify The Channels

Create one-pagers or cheat sheets for specific activities, like training or unique campaigns. You see, our organization was trying to figure out its social media policies within the confines of a highly regulated industry. It blocked access to any website with a social component — including YouTube. When employees were asked about using social media on their own time and devices, the company’s initial guidance was they didn’t want them using social media at all.

That’s not the case and Best Buy does a great job of setting these expectations for its employees. To do so, this means keep it simple, clear, accessible, and continued to be updated. The goal is to not frustrate your workforce or discourage employees from participating in social media. But, it does need to emphasize some basic conduct so there are no major issues in the future. The challenge is many companies do not know how to best organize a good social policy and want to ensure employees are actually reading it.

Now let’s shift gears and examine the architecture of an effective social media policy. Crafting one isn’t just slapping together some rules—it’s assembling elements that, together, guide and safeguard online interactions. First, a policy often delineates guidelines on sharing sensitive company information.

Nobody wants to go through a PR crisis because someone retorted with a “no u” to a troll. Or documents relating to a still-in-the-works-and-totally-secret social media campaign. There are 4 security levels, so Planable offers lots of flexibility. We’re not going to get into any legalese, that’s a subject for another article. So think about it this way — social media guidelines are instructive, while social media policies are mandatory. Social media guidelines and social media style guides are often used interchangeably.

Remember, it takes just one tweet or post with privileged information to create irreversible damage. In the age of information, discretion is more than just a virtue—it’s a necessity. The confidentiality and privacy guidelines within a social media policy emphasize the importance of safeguarding sensitive information. Lastly, a comprehensive social media policy educates employees about common cyber threats like phishing scams, which often hide behind legitimate-looking messages or links. The social media guidelines provided here should be useful and relevant to the entire CUNY community.

They lay down best practices and outline how teams should behave on social media in a healthy way for the company — things like how to reply to angry customers or handle trolls (but more on that later). Weekly campaign calendar in Planable with scheduled social media posts across multiple platforms. And the bigger the company, the higher the chances of someone saying something that they shouldn’t have said on Twitter. If you’re running a small business, you don’t need another reminder that social media matters, but a system that actually drives growth without eating up your time. After years of working on digital growth strategies for SaaS companies and small businesses, with a…