You can also organize workshops, webinars, or meetings to explain your guidelines and answer any questions. You can also create checklists, templates, or tools to help your team and stakeholders implement your guidelines. Next, you need to define who is in charge of what when it comes to social media.

Social Media Brand Guidelines: Create Consistent Voice & Visuals

However, NYCPS employees should be aware that there are limitations to privacy settings. Private communication published on the internet can easily become public. Furthermore, social media sites can change their current default privacy settings and other functions.

So let’s unravel some actionable tips to help you design a policy that’s tailored, effective, and resilient in the face of the ever-evolving digital realm. Too restrictive policies can stifle creativity and genuine engagement, making the brand come off as robotic or insincere. On the flip side, a vague policy leaves too much room for interpretation, resulting in inconsistent online representation and potential missteps. This includes not disclosing proprietary company details or intellectual property, not oversharing about clients or internal operations, and being cautious about personal data.

Engage staff, board members, and volunteers in the policy development process to ensure buy-in and relevance. Encourage an open dialogue where they can share concerns and suggestions to enhance the effectiveness of the policy. Define how compliance with the social media policy for non-profits will be monitored. Check out our visual content strategy guide to define your visual aesthetic on social to boost growth and engagement. Plus, if you offer live trainings, you can quickly answer questions your team might have about the material.

Consequences For Violating The Policy

It also has a specific section to help those who post to social media on behalf of the ICO or are contacted by the media for comments as representatives of the organization. An unhappy former NBA employee retained login credentials to the brand’s Facebook account and posted this scathing rebuke of the league. A section of your social media policy should cover how to offboard former employees. A social media policy is a document written by your organization to provide guidance to employees about their actions and behaviors online. Along with implementing a social media policy for employees, some brands create a separate policy for content creators and influencers.

To protect a company’s reputation, ensure messages align with brand values, and provide clear procedures should things go awry. In today’s social media climate and regardless of public vs. private social media accounts, everything you post is public to a degree and posts can never be truly scrubbed from the internet. Social media accounts that use CUNY’s name, likeness or logo to disseminate offensive, abusive and inappropriate content could violate student code of conduct and employee policies and procedures. A social media style guide is an important document for social teams of all sizes. Whether you’re a team of one or 100, recording your decisions about brand voice and style in a central place ensures consistency in your social media presence — and builds brand trust.

In fact, there should be an additional, separate guide for social media managers and anyone else with the passwords to your business’s social accounts. Your social media policy will speak to your entire team so that no one makes a mistake that could damage your brand’s reputation. A social media policy is part of a company’s business code of conduct that tells employees how they should represent themselves and the brand on social media. It includes guidelines to protect the brand’s security, privacy and legal interests.

Not everyone wants to have their photo shared all over social media. You should advise your employees to give some thought to the conversations that they have offline with colleagues or customers, giving them guidance around maintaining the privacy of those conversations. Remind employees to use their best judgement and common sense when engaging on social media. While AI tools can offer insights and suggestions, they are not foolproof and may not always understand the full context. Tell them that if they’ve made a mistake on social media make some headway towards fixing it and setting the record straight. When you finish writing, the next step is sharing the policy with your company.

These tools can take your engagement, content creation and customer interactions to the next level. The other reason is your own social media profile; as an organization, you’ll want to have a consistent voice on your social media and want to avoid posting potentially risky statements or information. A social media policy for employees can give them the instructions they need to know how to handle corporate accounts. For example, The Candida Diet’s social media policy includes health claim guidelines. The company added them after an employee’s post created regulatory concerns.