Social Media Guidelines With Business Accounts

Running your own social media account is a great way to network. If you are someone that loves to engage with people, find new resources, and spend the time and energy in digital relationships, social media is definitely your playground. Even bloggers and single person business people have found great success on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

But what about a multi-person business? How do you properly run a corporation of 100, 1,000, or tens of thousands of people successfully? Are the rules the same or should you be approaching it differently? The difficult thing is that as much as social media is talked about online this topic is rarely discussed, so after much brainstorming, these are some of the guidelines we came up with to use corporate accounts better.

Social Media Guidelines for Youth for Christ/USA

• Use one dedicated device for your tweeting during special events. This means that you cannot tweet from any other accounts during events. I don’t want to have this happen to us.
• All tweets should have a unified voice from YFC as a brand, not you as an individual. Speak with the voice of YFC.
• Do not tweet more than 9 times a day total. This does not include @reply tweets.
• You can @reply with others on Twitter, but you do not need to engage with all of them. Unless you are answering a question, limit responses to no more than 40% of conversations and no less than 15%.
• All @reply’s must follow with your initials (the ” JG” is part of the 140 characters)
• Images get more engagement. Faces are best. Utilize them well.
• No tweets can go over 140 characters. No shortening of text with substitute characters. (& for and, 2 for to, too, or two, and b for be) Also, no DMs to anyone.
• All tweets must include the necessary hashtag that goes with the event (i.e. #yfcregional) but not @reply’s. This along with the 140 character limit means you need to be intentional.

It should be noted that these guidelines were written on a three hour flight via my iPhone. Could/Should there be more rules? Undoubtedly. We have not even touched Facebook or Google+ yet. But for now, assuming the user has a basic understanding of effective engagement on social media networks, this was a great start.

Because of the lack of resources online for corporate social media account guidelines, I’d love to start a crowdsourced approach. What do you feel should also be a part of the social media guidelines?

Jeremy Smith

Jeremy is owner of ChurchAndMentalHealth.com and the Co-Occurring Program Coordinator and a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor at a community mental health center. Jeremy has a history of working as a ministry director for Youth for Christ for 8 years and then working as a mental health and substance use adult counselor in Colorado and Ohio, specifically running an Opioid Residential Treatment Center.