With the continued use of social media in the workplace, employers must draft a policy to guide employees. Without one, they may face a crisis, such as an employee disclosing trade secrets, misunderstood tweets, or your company getting accused of discrimination. However, after drafting a social media policy, it’s essential to ensure compliance. Otherwise, it will not serve the purpose it was meant to.
Steps in Implementing a Social Media Policy
Follow these steps when implementing a social media policy:
Create a Social Media Policy
The first step towards implementing a social media policy is to create one. Otherwise, how can you ensure compliance with something that doesnt exist? The policy should explain the rules and regulations for using social media. These could cover:
- Confidentiality
- Copyrights
- Security
- Ethics
- Crisis management
Ensure that your social media policy complies with the industry standards.
Communicate Your Social Media Policy
All employees, contractors, and stakeholders should be aware of your social media policy. The document should be easy to understand and kept in a place where it is easily accessible.
You can keep it in form of emails, webinars, videos, and intranet. Ensure that the new information is given to employees whenever you update it. To determine if your employees understand the document, encourage them to ask questions and provide feedback.
Train Employees on Social Media Policy
You can spend a lot of time creating a social media policy and making it accessible to employees. But if they don’t understand how to use it responsibly and effectively, all your efforts will be in vain.
The training should be extended to everyone involved in content creation, posting, and management of your social media site. If a staff member always represents your company on social media in any role, such as brand advocacy, you should also include them in the training. Some of the areas to train them on are:
- How to create appropriate and engaging content
- Words they should or shouldn’t use on social media when referring to your brand.
- Topics that you do not want to be mentioned in reference to your brand.
- How to handle a social media crisis.
- The dos and don’ts of discussing your brand.
- Stories and videos that require disclosure when referring to your brand. For instance, Talking about another parent brand where you are an affiliate.
- Kinds of visuals they need to avoid. For instance, the behind-the-scenes areas of your business or images with a computer screen revealing sensitive information.
- For employees doing brand advocacy where they create content for your business, train them on the brand voice to use and the words or tones they should avoid.
- How they should handle negative comments.
Monitor Employee’s Activity on Social Media
The best way of finding out if your social media policy is being followed is by monitoring employee activity and the performance of your social media accounts. You can use tools to track brand mentions and find out what people say about your brand. You should also track engagement, reach, conversions, and sentiments.
Keep reviewing content on your social media channels to ensure it complies with your policy and standards. In case of any violations, address the issue fast and transparently.
Provide Feedback
To ensure your team keeps improving, give them feedback on their conformity to your social media policy. Continue supporting them to keep improving their social media policy knowledge. If there are some best practices, you should share and celebrate their feedback.
Appreciate Your Social Media Team
Don’t be too fast to punish those who violate your social media policy, but be slow to recognize those who conform. You might be surprised by the power of positive reinforcement. Take time to recognize the team that follows your social media policy and guidelines.
Let them know that you appreciate their role in your social media success. If they have any achievements on social media, share them and celebrate with the rest of the company.
Wrapping Up
A social media policy plays an important role in ensuring the compliance boundaries that employees should work within on social media. It can help them avoid copyright issues, slander, defamation, or privacy intrusion. However, without compliance, the document will serve no purpose.
When you ensure social media policy compliance, you can sleep peacefully, knowing your brand will not face any social media crisis. By following the above steps, you can easily ensure compliance with social media policy.
