What social media guidelines will you follow to ensure your language is inclusive and fair? Engage team members in discussions as you develop your inclusive language guidelines. If your team is too large for everyone to join the discussion, make sure you have a variety of perspectives represented. Distribute preliminary guidelines for feedback.
Remember that accessibility is a key component of inclusivity.
Content unit sizes
Describe the dimensions of your posts, titles, and captions, based cell phone number list on social media guidelines and restrictions, as well as best practices for promotion.
This is an important component of communication in social networks, which allows you to express emotions, highlight important thoughts and improve the visual perception of a large volume of texts. But emoji can also reverse the meaning of what is said, can be taken literally, and cause ambiguous situations.
Determine whether your brand uses emojis. If so, which ones? How many? On which channels? How often? Also describe the possibility of using GIFs, stickers, and masks.
Calls to action
Decide early on how and where you’ll use calls to action on your social media channels. How often will you ask your readers to take a specific action, like clicking a link or downloading an app? What action words will you target? Which words should you avoid?
Do you post content on behalf of your brand or attribute posts to individual team members? For example, customer service social accounts often use initials to indicate which team member is responding to a public post. If this is how you approach customer comments, be sure to include this in your social media style guide.
Social Media Policy
While your social media style guide explains the fine details, your social media policy describes the big picture.
It sets out the company's expectations for employee behavior on social media, which typically includes guidelines on privacy, ethics, use of information, and what to do if negative feedback is received.
Here are some key points to include:
Team roles: who is responsible for creating and publishing content, who has the final say on what gets published;
Content: what type of content is appropriate (e.g. product photos, employee photos, company news, memes), are there any taboo topics;
Time: when the content is published (e.g. during business hours, outside business hours);
Security Protocols: How to Manage Passwords and Security Threats;
Anti-crisis plan: how your team can cope with a crisis situation, action plan;
Compliance with legislation;
Recommendations for employees: for personal and professional use of social media.
Customer/Audience Profiles
If you haven’t already defined your target market and developed audience personas, now is the time to do so. Before you can develop an effective brand voice, you need to know who you’re talking to.
When creating audience personas, consider the following:
Basic demographic data (location, age, gender, occupation,
Hobbies and interests,
Pain points (what aspects do they need help with),
How they use social media,
What content they engage with (e.g. blog posts, infographics, videos).
The more details you can provide your team from the start, the better prepared they will be to develop content that will appeal to your target market.
