First, Hootsuite allows you to create custom permissions for all users. You can require approvals from senior staff or compliance officers before content can be scheduled or published. The University of Texas at Austin’s generative AI policy is a great example of how to set clear, practical guardrails around these new tools. It breaks down exactly how students, faculty, and staff should (and shouldn’t) use AI. All healthcare social media marketers should get familiar with the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
So let’s unravel some actionable tips to help you design a policy that’s tailored, effective, and resilient in the face of the ever-evolving digital realm. Too restrictive policies can stifle creativity and genuine engagement, making the brand come off as robotic or insincere. On the flip side, a vague policy leaves too much room for interpretation, resulting in inconsistent online representation and potential missteps. This includes not disclosing proprietary company details or intellectual property, not oversharing about clients or internal operations, and being cautious about personal data.
Beyond the problem of reputational risk, your organization likely collects confidential information. If someone were to leak confidential data accidentally or intentionally, your nonprofit could be facing legal ramifications, as well. Your board members should be aware that there’s no way to prevent a bad or questionable social media post from going viral even if the content was only up for a short time. Posts can be copied, saved, or shared within seconds creating reputational risk for your nonprofit. As you create your community guidelines, remember to keep them simple yet specific, and involve your members to ensure that they are open and understanding of your rules. When creating community guidelines for your brand or business, it’s helpful to get a sense of what other companies have in place.
Develop Solid Social Media Guidelines For Your Team
As you may have noticed, this social media policy differs from X’s in two key aspects. Another great example is the Coca-Cola Company’s social community guidelines for employees and affiliates that work in their line of alcohol ready-to-drinks. For example, X’s social media policy is colossal, and well documented. Create a doc with pre-approved copy snippets for frequently asked questions. When you make it easy to do the right thing, people are much more likely to do it. Put it in a shared cloud drive, pin it in your team’s Slack or Teams channel—make it impossible to ignore.
To protect a company’s reputation, ensure messages align with brand values, and provide clear procedures should things go awry. In today’s social media climate and regardless of public vs. private social media accounts, everything you post is public to a degree and posts can never be truly scrubbed from the internet. Social media accounts that use CUNY’s name, likeness or logo to disseminate offensive, abusive and inappropriate content could violate student code of conduct and employee policies and procedures. A social media style guide is an important document for social teams of all sizes. Whether you’re a team of one or 100, recording your decisions about brand voice and style in a central place ensures consistency in your social media presence — and builds brand trust.
To ensure that your team and stakeholders use social media effectively and ethically, you need to create clear and consistent social media guidelines. Continuously evaluate the effectiveness of your social media style guide and make adjustments as needed to ensure its relevance and efficacy over time. Solicit feedback from team members, stakeholders, and audience members to identify areas for improvement and incorporate learnings into future iterations of the guide. Identify and gather the key visual elements that contribute to your brand’s identity, such as logos, colors, typography, and imagery. Determine how these elements should be used consistently across different social media platforms to maintain brand recognition and coherence.
Compliance & Legal
These examples don’t just show what a policy looks like — they demonstrate how different organizations translate the elements we’ve discussed into practical, enforceable guidelines. AI now touches almost every part of social media operations — from content creation to moderation — which means it’s also a growing source of brand risk. As mentioned above, there are a lot of social media security risks out there. In this section of your policy, you provide guidance on identifying and dealing with them. A comprehensive social media suite like Hootsuite can be very useful for solidifying your social media workflow.
If a new platform takes off or your company strategy shifts, update your guidelines to stay current and relevant. Create a unique hashtag for the takeover to track engagement and encourage participation. During the takeover, actively monitor the account to ensure everything runs smoothly. Work together to create a content plan that blends their style with your brand voice.
Regularly review and update your policy to reflect evolving digital trends and organisational changes. With the right framework in place, your non-profit can harness the power of social media to amplify its mission and drive meaningful impact. Utilize Sprout’s Instagram integration to create, schedule, publish and engage with posts.
University Marketing And Communications
At its core, social media policy translates an organization’s values, mission, and objectives into actionable guidelines for interactions on social media. Your social media guide must always support the main brand guidelines, never contradict them. It’s the specialized playbook your team uses for the day-to-day game on social channels. This should spell out exactly how to ask for permission to repost and how to credit the original creator in the caption and tags.