Social Media Guidelines for Your Employees

It's inevitable. Your employees use social media and may check their profiles at work. How do you regulate social media checking by your employees? Take the first step by stating your expectations with social media guidelines. Create a document called "Social Media Guidelines" that you can distribute to employees that lay out what your company thinks is proper social media usage at work. Why call it "guidelines" versus "rules?" Your employees will most likely be more receptive to guidelines rather than mandated rules.

To create your Social Media Guidelines document, make sure you answer the following:

• Why you're publishing the guidelines
• How is the company using social media
• What social media sites are appropriate to use at work
• What purposes are social media usage appropriate at work
• Who should employees contact if they have further specific questions

Social Media Guidelines are going to be different for every company. What you choose to do will depend on what your employees' job responsibilities are, if you offer products or services, and how concerned you are with what your employees are doing with their time at work.

In many cases, LinkedIn is the most appropriate social media site because it's a professional social media site. Not only can you showcase your employees' backgrounds but they can connect with customers that they work with. They can also see who their peers and customers are connected to.