Developing social media guidelines

Agreeing some simple principles

If lots of people are contributing to your social media channels — or you would like them to be — it’s important to have some guidelines in place.

Guidelines help protect your brand and can offer useful support for staff who lack confidence with social media. They’re also a great way to keep everyone on track and posting things that will help achieve your goals.

This toolkit is designed to help you work through some of the key areas to include. Use it on your own or with a team, as a starting point to develop a set of guidelines that works for your organisation.

Question #1 - Why are we on social media?

The answer may vary for different social media channels. If you have a distinct reason for using each channel, you may want to work through them separately. Think about the following:

• Who are you there to ‘socialise’ with?
• How will social media help drive forward your mission and vision?
• What actions or changes will count towards success?
• What do you aim to achieve?

Question #2 - What are our specific goals?

Setting specific and measurable goals enables you to focus, monitor your progress, and achieve optimum results from your social media activity.

• Be Specific — a goal like ‘increasing Twitter engagement’ gives you lots of options to test. Narrow it down — e.g. increasing retweets of videos — and a few focused experiments will enable you to achieve your goal.
• Make it Measurable — remove guess work by identifying clear measures of success. If you want to increase retweets of videos by 10%, you will need a baseline figure and a system for recording future video retweets.
• Make it Attainable — if you’ve been trying for five years to increase retweets of videos then setting yourself a 10% target may not be achievable.
• Make it Relevant and realistic — your goals should align with your organisation’s goals. Otherwise, you may struggle to find the time and money to achieve them.
• Make it Timely — setting a deadline will ensure it doesn’t drop off your list.

Download the full guide:
Developing social media guidelines (pdf)

Download the accompanying guidelines template:
Social Media Guidelines template