The Top 3 Social Media Guidelines for Your Company

You may have realized that your company needs a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, and other social media accounts, but it's also important to establish a company-wide social media policy when you establish those pages. Here are our top 3 tips for establishing the perfect social media policy for your company:

• Create and cultivate a specific "voice" that translates across all of your social media. Your company's voice should be consistent and reflect company values.
• Give your social media to people you can trust and allow them to respond on the fly. It's important that the social media team be able to respond in real time to whatever is happening at that moment.
• Make everyone in your company a brand ambassador by offering up guidelines for employees when discussing their workplace online. Most people have social media accounts, so it makes sense that employees would talk about their workplace occasionally.

For more tips on establishing the perfect social media policy for your company, check out our article on social media policy on our website.

Do You Have a Social Media Policy for Your Business?

There are two types of social media policies: one that dictates employees’ behavior and one that provides guidelines for the social media person or team that is posting on behalf of or as the company. This post is about the latter.

First, why is it important to have a social media policy? A social media policy should not be created to restrict your social media team from certain activities, but rather to provide guidance in situations that cannot be foreseen. If you don’t trust your social media person or team, then why are they handling your social media?

Every good social media marketer should be aware of the company’s voice and strive to cultivate an online personality for it using the company’s brand guidelines. A great example of this is the interaction between @Oreoand @AMCTheatres on Twitter, two powerhouse brands that obviously have great social media policies. The witty and fun repertoire that recently occurred between the accounts played out in a humorous discourse that was retweeted hundreds of times. AdWeekeven called it “one of the best Twitter replies ever.” The digital marketing manager for AMC Theatres, Shane Adams, wrote about this exchange on his blog and gave some important reasons why social media policies should be flexible enough to allow the team not just to post, but to respond:

1. Trust – Yes, the point was made above that if you don’t trust the person(s) in charge of social media, don’t give them the keys to your kingdom. However, it is also important to note that giving trust also empowers your employees: “That ownership in what we do better equips myself and my colleagues to do amazing things,” says Adams.
2. Brand Voice – while you may not work for a brand that’s as “fun” as movies or cookies, understand your brand’s voice and knowing what is and is not acceptable goes a long way toward cultivating that trust.
3. Autonomy – Shane and his team at AMC Theatres and the social media team at Oreo would not have been able to respond as quickly and cleverly as they did if they did not have at least some autonomy to make decisions and embrace opportunities.

As Shane puts it, GAME ON.

Does your company have a social media policy in place? What else do you think is important to help guide your team?

4 Ways to Handle Negative Posts Online

A friend of mine recently called me freaking out about a negative post her company received on Yelp. My advice? "Don't Panic." A negative review is not the end of the world, but it is something that needs to be immediately addressed. Better yet, have a plan for this type of scenario already in place and you won't need to go through the "freak out" stage if it does happen to you - you'll simply spring into action. 

You could have the best customer service in the world as well as a superior product, and there will always be that one person who finds something to complain about… And they will do it (gasp!) online. Having a social media policy creates guidelines for how to respond when a customer posts something negative about your company or product. There are four basic ways to handle a negative post or comment:

1.       Answer the post – it shows your concern for customer issues and your willingness to make improvements where possible.

2.       Ask the person posting to contact you – this hopefully takes the conversation offline, but it still shows that you are responsive as a company. This can also be combined with #1.

3.       Delete the post, if possible – if the post was made on your Facebook page, for example, you could simply delete it; however, this could cause the user to leave additional angry posts, exacerbating the issue.

4.       Ignore the post – this is not recommended unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Responding to issues online and in the public view can help to alleviate the present issue, and can also work to prevent additional negativity on the Internet, which can quickly become a reputation management problem. A pro-active approach to combating negative posts is having great content that shows up in organic search results. This doesn’t happen overnight, though, so in the meantime, make sure you’re addressing customer issues as they come up – either in the real or virtual world. Paying attention to what your customers are saying is a good way to find out where you need to make system improvements and increase overall customer satisfaction.

Does your company have a social media or PR policy in place? How do you handle negative posts about your company online?