Establishing Your Social Media Community Guidelines

Social media is a powerful set of communications tools that almost anyone can use to connect with people and information. For companies and brands, there are many benefits in having a presence in social media including accounts on popular social networks. Those include:

1. Building brand awareness
2. Providing rapid customer service
3. Attracting new customers
4. Promoting goods and services
5. Generating sales

Regardless of your business goals or why or how you’re using social media in your marketing mix, an important step to managing your online presence and the audience that forms around it is to come up with a set of community guidelines. These guidelines outline the "rules" of interacting with you through your social media account.

Consult your legal counsel regarding any legal liability and compliance issues that you should consider related to interacting with others online and managing your social media accounts. While your community guidelines are not a legally binding document, they should keep in mind potential liability issues.

Your community guidelines are most effective when written in layperson’s language. They also should not be longer than about two pages and can be made easier to read using bullet points for key clauses.

What should you put into your social media community guidelines? While these guidelines vary from company to company, here is a standard format that you can use as a template.

Opening paragraph sets the tone:

At ABC company, we adhere to The Golden Rule.

Quickly establish what constitutes "violations" of your community guidelines and the actions you might take to address them.

We appreciate your participation in our online community, however, know that we reserve the right to remove inappropriate comments. By inappropriate, we mean:

• Obscene
• Libelous
• Rude
• Personal attacks

We do not, however, edit comments. If they are up in our community and have your name attached to it, then they are your words.

By posting anything to our online community, you are giving us your implied permission to reuse, republish, refer to and otherwise use your words in any format or medium.

What follows is up to you, what your legal counsel might advise, and the tone and personality you want to project as well as the type of online community environment you want to foster.

These are a few examples from actual community guidelines that can provide some ideas for additional rules.

1. Be kind. The Golden Rule applies here. We are looking for comments on content or issues, not individuals.
2. Be discriminating. We appreciate it when you share your photos and videos but please make sure they are appropriate to our forum and that you have permission from everyone in the photo or video. By uploading anything here, you are implying you have all permissions to publish.
3. Be truthful. We work hard to check our facts and tell you what we believe to be true. We ask that you do the same. If something seems suspect, we may be obligated to delete it rather than create a negative situation for everyone.
4. Don’t spam. If you come to our community to promote your company, service or product, chances are we will remove the post unless it is relevant to the conversation and done so in a non-commercial fashion.
5. Add value. While we know that value is in the eye of the beholder, we hope that you contribute comments in the spirit of elevating this community to higher levels of discourse and to provide information useful to the community at large.
6. Link appropriately. Please confine the links in your blog comment to appropriate, relevant sites.

End your community guidelines reiterating what actions you are prepared to take to keep your online community safe and welcoming.

We reserve the right to ask you to leave or to block you from our community if you are unable to adhere to our Community Guidelines. We will always provide a reason if we delete content or files or block someone - as long as they provide their correct email address for us to reach and notify them. We will be open to valued members of our online community as to why we do what we do.

Please refer to our online Privacy Policy regarding questions about your content and information and how we use it.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at _____________________ and ______________.

Always include multiple ways for people to get in touch such as an email or contact form, a phone and/or fax number, and/or a location or mailing address.

Once you complete your community guidelines document, post it online so it is easily accessible to anyone interacting with you in social media. Post it to your website as either a web page or downloadable PDF file or both then link to it from your social media accounts. Each social network may provide a different area where you can include a link. On Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks that let you add links into the bio section, include this additional link as a short link in the bio. On Facebook, you can add a link within the About section of your Page or even paste the guidelines directly into the About or Additional Information section.

Your community guidelines for social media help set the stage for kinder conversations and behaviors from your followers. They also give users a clearer understand of what will happen if they don’t behave appropriately.