Five Steps to crafting a social media policy for your startup

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So you’re using social media as part of your startup marketing strategy to help build awareness for your new business but you don’t have an official policy in place.  Hopefully, you are no longer asking yourself ‘why the need for the policy’ as that would have been fully ventilated in my previous blog titled ‘What Social Media Policy!’ - https://sanciacampbell.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-social-media-policy.html

While you may be a one-man operation, you may just have someone managing your business’s social media and so your policy becomes even more important. The following are five simple steps that you can take to craft your social media policy:

1.       Have goals and objectives – Whether it is to increase brand awareness, grow your social following or increase engagement with online customers, there must be established goals and objectives for having a social media marketing campaign.  Otherwise, you will just be on social media for being sake.

2.       Have a content plan – It is critical to know exactly what you are going to post and when.  A detailed content plan does not allow for ‘winging it’.  As a business owner, you should have already found out that planning ahead is critical to achieving business goals, so it is with social media marketing.  Having a plan helps your business to define its messages and target the right audiences.

3.       Remain consistent over all platforms – It is best to synchronize your social media platforms so that posting on one, automatically publishes on all – not only does it save time but it helps your business to remain consistent over all platforms in terms of messaging. 

4.       Incorporate employees – You may have none or just one right now, but the hope is that your startup now will be an established business very soon.  It is therefore important to incorporate any employees that you have as they may very well be the one managing your social media platform.  It is important to ensure that they are aware of your business’s confidentially policy both on and offline. 

5.       Know the social media landscape – Believe it or not, not every social media space is for your business.  Do an assessment of each platform and based on their attributes and capabilities as well as the type of audiences that frequently use each platform, make a selection.

Of course, these steps are not exhaustive, the bigger your business grows, the more in-depth your social media policy should become so constant revision and input from your growing team is necessary.