Aliza Sherman is a web pioneer, author, and international speaker. Sherman is the author of 8 books about the Internet including The Everything Blogging Book, Streetwise Ecommerce, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Crowdsourcing and Social Media Engagement for Dummies. | |
Establishing Your Social Media Community GuidelinesSocial media is a powerful set of communications tools that almost anyone can use to connect with people and information. For companies and brands, there are many benefits in having a presence in social media including accounts on popular social networks. Those include:
Regardless of your business goals or why or how you’re using social media in your marketing mix, an important step to managing your online presence and the audience that forms around it is to come up with a set of community guidelines. These guidelines outline the "rules" of interacting with you through your social media account. Consult your legal counsel regarding any legal liability and compliance issues that you should consider related to interacting with others online and managing your social media accounts. While your community guidelines are not a legally binding document, they should keep in mind potential liability issues. Your community guidelines are most effective when written in layperson’s language. They also should not be longer than about two pages and can be made easier to read using bullet points for key clauses. What should you put into your social media community guidelines? While these guidelines vary from company to company, here is a standard format that you can use as a template. Opening paragraph sets the tone:
Quickly establish what constitutes "violations" of your community guidelines and the actions you might take to address them.
What follows is up to you, what your legal counsel might advise, and the tone and personality you want to project as well as the type of online community environment you want to foster. These are a few examples from actual community guidelines that can provide some ideas for additional rules.
End your community guidelines reiterating what actions you are prepared to take to keep your online community safe and welcoming.
Always include multiple ways for people to get in touch such as an email or contact form, a phone and/or fax number, and/or a location or mailing address. Once you complete your community guidelines document, post it online so it is easily accessible to anyone interacting with you in social media. Post it to your website as either a web page or downloadable PDF file or both then link to it from your social media accounts. Each social network may provide a different area where you can include a link. On Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks that let you add links into the bio section, include this additional link as a short link in the bio. On Facebook, you can add a link within the About section of your Page or even paste the guidelines directly into the About or Additional Information section. Your community guidelines for social media help set the stage for kinder conversations and behaviors from your followers. They also give users a clearer understand of what will happen if they don’t behave appropriately. Read other social media blogs by Aliza Sherman |