Making the most of social media as a business means having a social media policy.
When it comes to social media for your company, it can be a daunting task if you don’t understand how it can fully be utilized. As a company, you don’t want to go viral for the wrong reasons, and that may make you timid in your approach to social media. Social media is an integral part of business these days though, and having a social media policy is a non-negotiable.
“It’s a fairly new territory as far as policies go,” Crystal Mackay, founder and CEO of Loft32, says on the June 15 episode of Seed Speaks. She encourages companies to share their social media policy with employees to make sure it’s fully utilized and doesn’t get forgotten about.
To start making a social media policy you should think of it as a circle — who are you? What do you do? Charles Tweed, owner of Tweedia, says from there you should re-ask yourself those questions, shaping them as, who are your people? Why did you start your business? From there you can start thinking about social media platforms and response strategies.
“We see a number of companies that are, what we call, serial posters. So, they post every day, but there’s no one actually in those accounts in those platforms creating conversation or even answering basic questions that people are asking on their posts. Which, I mean, that’s just a huge faux pas,” he adds.
An important part of social media is working with all employees on it. Tweed says that when Tweedia works with a new company, they’ll sit down with the employees and go through social media training plans. This work focuses on what the brand is, how they’re going to present it on social media and what they want their brand to sound like.
“The truth is, (social media) resonates different coming from a real person in your office with their face at the top of their profile, right? It just hits differently on social media. So yeah, the more you can bring them into the fold the better,” he says.
On top of that, you need to make sure your employees understand the importance of social media, both corporate and personal accounts. Mackay says being a good brand ambassador should be part of the onboarding experience for new employees. You should lay out what is considered offside for posting, such as swearing or excessive party pictures.
“Let’s have a conversation about how you’re repping our brand all the time, and how does that interact with your personal brand? I think it’s really important to give employees the freedom to have some personality in their posts and to share their personal experiences,” she says.
Tweed adds it’s important to help employees understand how the success of the company, which includes social media, is tied to their own personal success. If an employee doesn’t understand why social media and their personal brand is important, then the company’s social media presence isn’t going to work, he adds.
At the end of the day social media isn’t going anywhere, and Tweed says if you haven’t taken a serious look at it as a business then you need to take an examination of why that is.
“We have producers in southwestern Manitoba that have 4,000 followers. And when they say something about some of the brands we work for, it resonates and it means something. It’s incredibly important,” he adds.
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