Build a social media governance strategy to protect your brand, improve your social results, and make life easier for your overworked social team.
All brands using social media in any form must navigate a constantly evolving set of risks in an environment that changes at lightning pace. A social media governance strategy ensures you’re prepared for whatever the world of social media throws at you.
Keep reading to find out how to build a strategy that will help protect your brand, improve your social results, and make life easier for your overworked social team.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media policy template to quickly and easily create guidelines for your company and employees.
Social media governance is a collection of policies, systems, processes, and approval workflows. Together, they determine how your organization and its employees use social media, including:
A social media policy is a foundational building block of social media governance. But a policy alone is not enough. Your social media governance plan combines your policy with other documents related to:
This ensures you have a sound decision-making structure in place to protect your brand from social media risk.
A social media governance plan offers multiple benefits to your business.
A clear set of social media policies and guidelines for employees defines your brand voice. It sets the tone for how your organization uses social media tools.
This protects your brand in a couple of ways.
First, a clear social media voice and brand identity on social channels make it easy for followers to recognize your content and engage with your accounts. This also makes it easier for followers, customers, and prospects to identify your official brand channels. In turn, it’s easier to avoid being conned by fake social media accounts.
Secondly, those guidelines help ensure your social content aligns with your brand values. They also ensure employees understand that their social content reflects on your brand.
Decision-making can get complicated, especially within a larger organization. A social media governance strategy clearly defines who is responsible for which decision. It also outlines how those decisions are made.
It sets out a schedule and process for goal-setting and measurement. This clarifies who is responsible for social media analysis and reporting. It also notes what they should be reporting on and which stakeholders they need to include.
Even when things are going smoothly, this simplifies the lives of the social media team. But it’s critical when things get a little rocky. Say a campaign falls flat. Or maybe a strategy that has always worked before starts seeing lesser results. A clear decision-making path gets the social strategy back on track quickly while minimizing chaos and confusion.
In all cases, it allows your team to be nimble in responding to the constant change of social media. New platform starts to gain attention? You’ve got the decision-making process in place to determine whether it’s a fit for your brand. Algorithm change? You’ve got the structure to respond fast to stay ahead of the game.
A social governance strategy helps insulate your brand from regulatory risk. Regulatory risk is not only a concern for those that operate in the regulated industries. All brands need to ensure compliance with social media rules and marketing regulations,
As noted in our blog post on HIPAA and social media, there are major financial consequences for violating social media compliance guidelines. There can be legal and reputational consequences as well.
A social media policy sets the stage for social media compliance. The decision-making structures and approval workflows in your social media governance strategy provide additional protection.
You should also document requirements for response times and archiving.
Security is another bucket of corporate risk management factors all social media teams need to consider. First up, to anyone who’s still sharing social passwords with team members, we beg you to stop. Write a policy for password management into your social policy. Assign someone in your social governance documents to make sure it is enforced.
Tools like Hootsuite give you full password management control. That includes the ability to change or revoke access for any user at any time if they leave your team.
Your social governance documents and the related ongoing training also ensure your team is aware of the latest social media security risks from romance scams to LinkedIn phishing.
Not every brand will have to deal with a reputational crisis. But as we all learned in 2020, no organization is immune to crisis, no matter how tight your security protocols may be. Sometimes larger global (or even regional) issues constitute a crisis that requires your brand to pivot hard.
It will never be easy to respond in this type of situation. But a successful social media governance program provides the roadmap for navigating what comes next.
If you do face a crisis specific to your brand, your social media governance model gives you the framework to respond quickly and with grace. This is key to minimizing reputational damage.
We mentioned right up top that social media governance can help solidify your brand voice. This in turn protects your brand reputation. Your social media brand guidelines are the document that defines your social voice.
In addition to the style, tone, and language appropriate for your accounts, you need to clarify:
It’s also a good idea to link to your content library for examples of approved social content. It can also hold templates to create more consistent posts.
Your social media policy is a bigger-picture document. It details how your brand uses social media, including guidelines for employees both at work and on their personal accounts.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media policy template to quickly and easily create guidelines for your company and employees.
Your social media policy should include:
Feel unsure about defining how your employees can use their personal accounts? Remember that employees can harm your brand by violating compliance requirements on personal accounts. Or by posting objectionable content while identifying themselves as an employee. They can also bring risk to your company by using unauthorized and unsecure apps on company devices.
There’s no need to be draconian here – this is more about education than dictatorship. Want to encourage your employees to share approved social content? Build an employee advocacy strategy into your social media policy.
Your social media security protocols protect your brand from risks like:
Important items to include are:
Hootsuite’s team collaboration features help ensure password security. Every team member has their own Hootsuite login credentials. This provides specific account privileges that can be changed or revoked at any time.
Social media changes fast. Ongoing training is important for employees at all levels within your social media team.
You may want team members to pursue social media certification, or simply to keep up to date on the latest changes in the social sphere. Either way, build a continuing education plan (and budget) into your social media governance documents.
We might be biased, but we think the courses offered through Hootsuite Academy are some of the best. The certification process ensures mastery of the relevant skills at a consistent level.
Social monitoring gives you a window into what’s being said about your brand on social media. This can help you understand what’s working and what’s not within your social strategy. It’s also an excellent source of competitor intelligence.
Even more important in terms of social media governance, social monitoring is an early-warning system. It can alert you at the early stages of a social media crisis involving your brand. In particular, keep tabs on social sentiment and social share of voice. This lets you understand how people on social media feel about your brand at any time.
If social sentiment trends downward, or takes a steep dive, implement your crisis management plan. (We’ll talk about that next.)
Social listening takes social monitoring a step further. It uses the insights gained from monitoring to guide your social strategy. In this case, the information should feed back to your brand guidelines, social media policy, and social media goals.
This, more than any other component of your social media governance documents, has the potential to save your brand from critical damage while maintaining your team’s mental health. Your plan should include:
Approval workflows are absolutely critical during a crisis. But they can also help keep you from experiencing a crisis in the first place.
The appropriate approval workflow for your organization will vary depending on your industry and the level of social media compliance requirements you face. If you’re marketing outdoor adventure gear, for example, you might designate your social media manager to approve posts.
But if you operate in a regulated industry, you may need your compliance team to sign off on social content. Especially for new campaigns or platforms.
Hootsuite’s built in approval workflows and team assignments ensure the right person is always working on the right task. Junior employees or even contractors and agencies can create your content. They then put it into the approval queue so it’s ready for signoff by more senior staff.
While the previous documents have primarily focused on keeping your brand safe, this component of your social media governance strategy asks the most important question. Why are you using social media in the first place?
In many ways, this will guide all the rest of the components of your governance plan.
Start by setting SMART social media goals and clearly defining what metrics you will use to measure your success.
Then, create a plan for measurement, analysis and reporting out to relevant stakeholders. As you see what works and what doesn’t you can refine your goals and adjust your overall social media strategy.
You will also uncover insights that can feed back to other components of your social media governance strategy, including your brand guidelines.
Check out this video for a quick primer on how ongoing goal-setting drives your overall social strategy, which should be reflected in your social governance plan.
Picking the right tools to execute your social media strategy is an important element of your social media governance plan.
We might be biased, but we believe that Hootsuite is the best social media management tool for teams whose workflows prioritize efficiency and brand security.
With Hootsuite, you can:
Learn more about how Hootsuite can streamline your processes:
The five pillars of a social media governance plan are:
Social media governance is critical because it protects your brand from risk and ensures there’s a plan in place to deal with a crisis if it does occur.
Easily manage all your social media profiles using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can schedule and publish posts, engage your followers, monitor relevant conversations, measure results, set up custom workflows, and much more.
Manage all your social media in one place, measure ROI, and save time with Hootsuite.
Book a Demo
Fake social media accounts imitate your brand to confuse potential followers and the public. Here's how to protect your business and followers from fraudsters.
Protecting your brand's online reputation means getting proactive about brand safety, especially when it comes to social media.
It's never been easier to observe, analyze and optimize the conversation around your brand — also known as "brand monitoring" — especially with these tools.
Pin down your unique strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats by running a simple social media SWOT analysis.
See how you can save time, work smarter, and improve results. Book a Hootsuite demo that’s tailored to your needs and find out why we’re trusted by big and small companies all over the world.
