Social media guidelines for businesses provide you with a framework to carry out your social media strategy and implement your social media tactics. They can also have a direct impact on the success of your social media endeavours.

Advantages of Social Media Guidelines

Here are four major benefits:

• Provides a way to implement your social media strategy and improve your social media performance.
• Gives everyone the information they need to work well together.
• Makes it easier to build your social communities online.
• Makes it possible to respond to emergencies before they get out of hand.

With the right strategy, social media guidelines can have a direct impact on your success.

Social Media Guidelines for Employees

Some companies feel the need to provide their employees with general guidelines on how to use social media for both their personal profiles as well as professional profiles. These guidelines can simply be reminders of what’s considered confidential information or information that could have legal ramifications if shared on social networks in any format.

Social Media Guidelines for Big Companies

While big companies almost always have existing communication policies and these guidelines also apply to social media communication, they also need to make sure they address the specific dos and don’ts. Big companies might require both internal social media policies and external social media policies. The question of managing social media celebrities may also be integrated into their social media guidelines.

Social Media Guidelines Adapted to Small Companies

Smaller companies may not need all of these social media policies and guidelines. For example, with fewer staff and less time available, smaller companies may decide it’s quicker to “block” people who leave inappropriate comments.

They might only need one well-crafted set of guidelines, some good judgment and an understanding of social media and their company’s online strategies. And even if smaller companies think they don’t need social media guidelines like the bigger companies, they can benefit tremendously from one, because it will:

• Help them to stay focused on their social media strategy
• Allow them to benchmark their progress and better evaluate what to do next
• Allow them to manage the time they invest in social media better

Find the Right Social Media Guidelines for Your Business

Here are three things you can do to help you create social media guidelines for your business:

1. Check out the social media policies and guidelines of companies similar to yours in the lists mentioned above.
2. Listen to our expert interviews, in which many of these social media pros share the simple guidelines that work well for them.
3. Read through the social media case studies here on Social Media Examiner to see how other companies use social media successfully.

You’ll learn more as you engage on social media and implement your first social media guidelines. So remember to seek feedback and be ready to tweak your guidelines from time to time to fit in with how your business communicates on your social networks. The social platforms change and people also change in how they communicate on them.

 Models To Follow

You can easily find examples of social media policies and guidelines used by big companies. Here are a few examples to DOWNLOAD of social media policies you can incorporate:

• • Social Media Guideline Conservative
  • Social Media Guideline Moderate
  • Social Media Guideline Unrestricted

What social media policies or guidelines does your company have in place? How have they helped your business? Let us know your comments in the box below.