Company’s social media activities guidelines

Where you’ve authorised particular employees to use social media for business-related purposes, you can issue them with our guidelines.

Social media policy

Our Social Media Policy already includes a section setting out some rules in relation to employees contributing to your own social media activities, for example, for marketing, promotional or recruitment purposes. It also includes more extensive rules about the use by employees of social media generally, whether for business or personal purposes. However, it also says that, when contributing to your social media activities, employees may be required to follow any additional guidelines that you may provide from time to time. This is where our Company’s Social Media Activities Guidelines fit in; they’re designed to be in addition to, and to complement, our social media policy. You only need to issue them though to those members of staff that you’ve authorised to post on your behalf on social media platforms; they don’t need to be issued to everyone.

Social media guidelines

Our guidelines are intended to provide guidance to employees around using social media for business purposes, covering such areas as the employee: (1) being aware at all times that they’re representing your business and so they should maintain high standards of professionalism and objectivity; (2) being knowledgeable, in the sense of ensuring that their postings reflect their level of skills, qualifications and experience and any comments are limited to their areas of expertise; (3) considering whether an online posting could be linked to your other posts to maximise your online exposure; (4) being open and transparent about who they are; (5) not using social media in a false or misleading way; (6) being interactive and encouraging a dialogue with their audience; (7) avoiding arguments and heated debates and being respectful of others’ conflicting views; (8) responding quickly to errors in postings; and (9) respecting business and client confidentiality.

Contravention

Our guidelines also make contravention of them a disciplinary offence. This will particularly be the case if an employee’s online postings could expose you to legal liability, adversely affect your client relationships or damage your business reputation.