I recently was asked a series of questions about how to develop the best social media policy. For this post, here are the questions and my answers – which will hopefully prove helpful  to you.

Q: What social media channels (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) do you believe are the most relevant/important?

That depends on what the organization’s goals and objectives are for its social media engagement. Different goals will lead to the utilization of different social platforms. Also, it depends on where the organization’s target audience members chose to network online.

I’d say the most popular platform is Facebook, but I have some clients for which LinkedIn provides 3-4 times the level of engagement than Facebook does. And in some industries (like tech), sites like Twitter and Google+ are utilized more often than Facebook.

This underscores the importance of collecting research on which social platforms are most utilized by your target audience as well as where they’d most like to engage with you: email, RSS feed, blog, video site, or any of the social platforms.

Organizations should always try to house engagement on a site they own and augment that, and drive traffic to it, from popular social platforms (where there’s higher traffic, but perhaps a less invested audience).

Q: If you were assisting a client with a similar project what guidelines/policies do you feel are most important to include regarding the use of our logo, photos, and other visual elements? What guidelines/policies do you feel are most important to include regarding language use and messaging?

Most importantly, that team members shouldn’t do anything online that they wouldn’t do in a seminar, at a trade show or in a client/prospect meeting. Online information should be an extension of real world information sharing – including sentiment, transparency and respect.

We hire people because we feel they’ll be right for the job. We should trust them, without blocking social sites, to be right for their employer online. If not, the policy should outline steps for addressing a team member’s inappropriate actions – both online and off-line.

Here’s a link to a site with dozens and dozens of policy examples from different industries. Find one that’s used for a similar organization and tailor it to suit your needs.

Q: For each of the most important social media sites, can you give 1 to 4 best practices/tips to help our social media users be successful?

See this How-To PDF.

Take the story, whatever it is, and repurpose it for sharing on all the social platforms you can. Use multimedia as much as possible. Keep words simple and brief, unless you’re providing a white paper or presenting research. People read headlines, sub-headings, bullets and very little else online. They spend a lot more time consuming visual communication pieces and watching online video.

Hope that helps.