TikTok’s guidelines are extremely detailed and in-depth — and are broken up into 11 sections. This adds an extra layer of accountability and reduces the chance of misunderstanding between moderators and members. Plan, manage, & analyze posts for every social channel in one spot with Later. They’re designed to help foster a positive and inclusive space where members can engage in meaningful discussions, share information, and collaborate respectfully.
It offers insights into the content that resonates with your audience, the social media channels that yield the most engagement, and even certain behaviors that need curbing. Moreover, an audit paints a clear picture of the brand’s online voice, ensuring that any new guidelines refine and enhance it. A social media policy is a company’s blueprint for how its employees should conduct themselves online. Think of it as a rulebook, offering guidance on what is and isn’t appropriate to post, share, or even like. As the online realm expanded, so did the urgency for a roadmap—a set of guidelines ensuring our interactions remain both consistent and secure. More than just a list of do’s and don’ts, it’s our North Star in the vast digital landscape—and we’ll explore why below.
Social Media Best Practices
For example, the Direct Selling Self-Regulatory Council (DSSRC) conducts regular monitoring. They recently found sellers for the multilevel marketing brand Limbic Arc making inappropriate product and income claims on social media. The council notified Limbic Arc, who contacted sellers to remove the claims. Limiting access to your accounts is critical to keeping your content under control.
Depending on your business you might need to cover your bases, especially if your organization handles sensitive information or operates in a regulated industry. Match your policy to each role’s visibility and how much they represent the company. Train managers so they know how to enforce the rules and where the legal lines are.
Follow the tried and tested tips below to help you develop social media guidelines for your team. Let’s work together to create guidelines that reflect your unique brand voice and business goals. Establish guidelines for posting, including any topics to avoid and how to handle customer interactions. Prepare your regular followers by announcing the takeover in advance, building anticipation for the event. At Social Think, we’ve seen firsthand how these collaborative efforts can boost a company’s online presence and engage audiences in new ways. This section helps clarify some of the policy’s dos and don’ts, making it easier for employees to understand what’s expected of them.
Factor all these into your social media guidelines to align your team with your clients’ campaigns and branding while complying with each platform’s standards. A social media management platform that actually helps you grow with easy-to-use content planning, scheduling, engagement and analytics tools. Social media guidelines are crucial for maintaining your clients’ brand image, avoiding miscommunication, and protecting brands from potential PR issues. Social media guidelines are best practices and rules that help teams manage and create on-brand, consistent content across social networks. Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection. Workshops reinforce the social media policy and address new challenges faced by employees.
Who The Policy Applies To
Providing specific details on what to say makes many employees feel more confident engaging on social media channels because they have specific instructions on what to say. This can cause not only a PR disaster, but also create legal consequences for the company and damage the brand’s reputation and credibility. For example, if you’re a law firm, your employees may post content intended to be thought leadership content but accidentally provide unauthorized legal advice. In 2021, 74% of organizations claimed they experienced a social media cyber attack, and employees are often the primary targets to infiltrate a company’s data.
Because social media emphasizes immediacy, access and personal sharing it is particularly important to minimize harm for your audience, your sources, your colleagues and yourself. Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information. Social media helps journalists find sources, engage audiences and develop story ideas as well as make personal and professional connections. To ensure the highest standards, students in Cronkite News must abide by the following standards for social media use, which reflect the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics core principles.
Below is a simple template you can use to develop your company’s social media guidelines. This template includes essential sections that cover employee expectations, confidentiality, and the proper use of company resources, but feel free to adjust it based on your organization’s specific needs. While employees have a right to express themselves online, this section clarifies how personal social media activity can still reflect on the employer. For example, if an employee lists the company in their LinkedIn bio, they must uphold certain standards even on personal posts. This helps protect the business from indirect negative exposure while maintaining freedom of speech.
Each policy applies to posts made on and off duty, and across all social media sites. A social media policy is a set of guidelines that tells employees how they should behave on social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X. A social media policy is important to prevent employees from harming the brand or reputation of their company.