Does your organization use Instagram? If yes then you should have an effective social media policy as over 70% population in the States alone use Instagram and state their employer has no social media policy. Do you wonder what it is or how to scheme one? Satay tuned with InstaBF, a leading Instagram and IGTV provider to find out more.
What a Social Media Policy Is and Its Benefits
By saying a good social media policy we understand a document with guidelines for an organization’s Instagram (or any other social media platform) use. This document should cover the target brand’s official channel, contain a guideline in the best and worst-case scenarios, as well as include information on how the employees should use it as professionally so personally. Since Instagram is constantly evolving, the social media policy should be altered when necessary, must be easy to understand. If you manage to create an up-to-date and straightforward document, the following benefits will be available for you:
- Your brand’s identity maintenance across all channels available
- Preventing a security breach and a full-blown PR crisis
- You can act quickly according to the policy if a crisis arises
- You will encourage your employees to amplify your brand’s message
What You Should Include in Your Instagram Policy
Here are the points that your social media policy must involve:
It should define your team’s roles
Every employee of your team should know their responsibilities both on a short-term and long-term basis. To make it easy, make up a list with names and email addresses of all your employees so that the whole team gets to know each others’ responsibilities. Assign them the following roles:
- daily posting and engagement
- strategy and planning
- customer service
- advertising
- passwords and security
- monitoring
- all types of approvals (financial, legal, etc.)
- response in the case of a crisis
- Instagram training for new employees
Security Protocols Must Be Established
Any social media platform including Instagram has many risks. Hence, one section of your social media policy must be devoted to the guidance on identifying all types of risks (password changing, the update of the organizational software, etc.) and the actions that must be undertaken if any occurs.
Scheme A Plan of Actions for Security and PR Crisis
One of the goals a social media policy pursues is preventing the necessity of using a crisis management plan. Despite this, it’s crucial to have both plans schemed and ready to be used. It must involve a contemporary emergency contact list with particular roles (those of PR and legal experts, social media team, etc.). Besides this, an international communication plan along with some guidelines for identifying the scope of the current crisis will help deal with it effectively and quickly.
Draw a Scheme of Staying Compliant with the Law
Depending on the state or the country, laws differ. However, certain points might be common for all social media policies irrespective of the location. These are:
- Privacy is key, hence make sure all your employees can handle customer information accurately.
- Copyright is forbidden by any country’s law. Therefore, be attentive when using third-party content.
- Confidentiality is highly crucial. Respect your own company’s internal information so must your employees do. They should be aware of all the consequences they will face once disclosing any data on Instagram that your brand considers private.