Most companies today have some presence on social media accounts – at the very least Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – but few realize the importance of establishing company-wide policies covering discussing the company over social media. Ideally, these policies should go into effect the day you open the social media account.
Like your company brand, you should develop one company voice to use consistently which represents your company values. The company voice should be the same across all of your social media and print marketing accounts.- If you have social media accounts, you should have one person responsible for posting to those accounts (or, if more than one, they should all use the same company "voice" online) and one (or more) persons responsible for 24/7 monitoring of those accounts.
- If you allow people to post comments on your social media site, be sure that the settings require an administrator to review all comments before they actually appear on your site. Some of the comments you receive will not be comments you want to see pop up on your account.
- There are software programs that will notify your administrator whenever your company name is mentioned on the internet. If you are not monitoring for these occurrences, you should be. Two issues people frequently discuss negatively online are when something negative happened at work or when things have gone poorly with customer service at a company they deal with. They didn’t get satisfaction following internal protocols, so they turned to social media to vent.
- Other comments you receive may need an immediate response. This is so important that your administrator's main responsibility should be to monitor your social media accounts. This position can require an entire team of employees in larger companies with active social media accounts.
- Your social media policy should include all employees of the company and their use of personal social media accounts. There should be strict guidelines on what an employee is allowed to say about the company when they are online for either business or pleasure.
Finally, I strongly encourage you to have this policy written by an attorney. There are similar technology-related issues (i.e., use of company computers, use of the company internet for personal reasons, etc.) that you should discuss with your attorney at the same time to assure your company's interests are protected on all fronts.
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