Social selling for B2Bs has been around since LinkedIn has been popular. And Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have all become beneficial for reps in various industries. Where your customers are, your need to be, too. This reality makes having a social media policy for yourself or your sales team a necessity.
In today’s post, we’ll go over a few things to help you develop your own. This could be for yourself to ensure you don’t get into trouble. More likely, it’s going to be for sales managers looking to keep their reps from running off good leads via social media.
Here’s what we’ll discuss:
- Potential Pitfalls of Not Having a Policy in Place
- What Should Be in Yours (using examples)
- How to Implement the New Policy
- A Copy/Paste Style Template
Life Without a Social Media Policy
Imagine you (or one of your reps) tweet something on your company profile without really thinking about it. Then go home for the day.
Turns out you (or your rep) misunderstood a hashtag. Instead of it being sales-related, it was actually supposed to raise awareness for some big cause. Now, the brand (by association) is coming off as insensitive and exploitive. They may say “all publicity is good publicity”, but it’s not as true as it once was. If it ever was at all.
Businesses, their employees, and others mess things up constantly. Social media is crazy powerful, but it’s more fickle than anyone could have imagine.
Don’t believe me?
Here’s what just happened to SnapChat.
Kylie Jenner tweeted (image below) about SnapChat in a negative way and it cost the company over a billion dollars.
You probably don’t have a sales rep or employee with quite that much pull, but there are plenty of scenarios that can occur when employees are representing you. Here are a few more “realistic” things that have happened.
- Over Engagement: This one is common. Your reps are just bugging leads too much. Sending private “how ya doing” messages on LinkedIn, creepily liking everything they post, or even making public comments about them — all bad and some are just creepy.
- Over Aggressive: Much like over engagement, but these reps take the “always be closing” mantra to a whole other level. Using social media to sell is very powerful. And much like other powerful tools, it has to be used correctly. You don’t want to scare prospects away.
- Over Sharers: There are very few secrets today, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try. Sensitive company information can find itself in the hands of reps, who can then let it fly onto the social airwaves. New features, investment details, even current clients who would like to remain unknown.
Seeing the need for a social media policy yet?
Again, there are a number of things that can go wrong that range from national headline problems to losing a few leads.
Social Media Policy Examples: What Should Go in Yours?
When it comes to this and most other policies, common sense goes a long way. These sort of guidelines are a common sense way of protecting yourself (or your organization) from those who lack, well, common sense.
That said, I’ve reviewed several companies and their social media policies. Here are the elements I found in most of them.
1. Disclaimer
There is always a section (usually at the very top) clearly stating that all employee created content is their own. Even if the company is mentioned, they had no part in creating or publishing what was written or said. Take the example below from IBM’s social media policy.
“IBMers are personally responsible for the content they publish on-line, whether in a blog, social computing site…
