Business tips: Benefits of establishing a social media policy

None can ignore the increase growth of the Internet and the social networking as the current days trends, most of you must be already using some of the social networks as Facebook and Twitter. I am taking into consideration the very large numbers of users (over 1 billion) and that you landed on this article - you probably want to find out more information about how you can use social media to your benefits. If you already have a business you can also read this article. For the moment I am taking in consideration only the benefits of establishing a social media policy.

Consider this: even you don't have social networks activity where you can interact with other people (potential clients and friends) there are great chances that your employees do have such activity! In some situations that can bring low productivity and misconduct from your employees.

A social media policy can bring order among your employees on how to use social networks and networks

There is an old saying: if you can't fight it, use it (or make it your "friend"). If you have employees that are daily users of social networks they will have the tendency to use it during work hours. You can't fight it, it's human nature to interact with others and the Internet is more that a tool: it's trendy. Use this in your policy: ask them to promote your business, the products and services your are offering.

Also, you can moderate the time everyone should spend when using social media on daily bases. If your employee spend all day promoting your business instead producing something concrete for your business than it's a loss of time and energy.

A social media policy prevents any gray area and misrepresentation of your company

Asking your employees to represent your business on social networks can bring you a lot of benefits because each of them have friends and each item they are sharing reach to the people with a "personal touch" (it's not the same as the established media channels as radio and tv and it can be very important).

There are 2 very important things you have to set clear using clear guidelines in the social media policy:

• the things they should not say or share. For example, someone could say something about the projects you are still developing and the competition can found about them before you are prepared. On the other hand, every contract have (or should have) some clauses of confidentiality and you should be prepared to inforce them using the policy. That means that you should put some boundaries about the information to be "leaked".
• how to share information. For example, you may don't want to be shared images and videos with your employees fooling around in the office or doing something stupid during the working time. Also, if one of your employee does not like some of your product or services he should stay quite instead saying bad things about them.

A social networks policy keep your employees focused

One of the most important reasons the employees uses social networking during the work period is that always appear some empty times (with no work to do) on some moment or another. They usually vary from one day to another, one period of the year to another, one region of the world to another and the type of the activity your employees are doing in your company. But they will appear... it's almost inevitable.

When you encourage your employee to represent your company on social media you keep them focused and, in some degree, you fill that empty time.