Internet Marketing – Developing Social Media Guidelines

by | Dec 28, 2011

A social media guideline for your online marketing in Tulsa is the framework of a successful social media strategy and is key to successfully leveraging sites like Facebook for your internet marketing.  Your guidelines have a direct impact on the success of all of your social endeavors with ripple effects felt throughout all of your online marketing in Tulsa.

So why haven’t you developed a set of guidelines for your own social media marketing?

Most business owners skip on it because they don’t fully understand how to use the platform of social media.  It’s hard to build a model for something if you don’t understand what it is to begin with.  If you don’t understand social media and it’s use for online marketing in Tulsa then you certainly don’t understand the value in having guidelines in the first place.  And that’s OK – we all have to start somewhere.

The Advantages of Social Media Guidelines for Online Marketing in Tulsa

There are four major benefits to establishing guidelines for your social media marketing and outreach.

  • Guidelines provide the means to visual your social media strategy and improve your social media performance
  • Guidelines give everyone the information they need to work together and share responsibility
  • Guidelines make it easy to build your social community
  • Guidelines give you the most appropriate route to respond to emergencies

Mimicking the social media guidelines of another company after looking over PDF’s online won’t serve you much good.  You can see how they manage their social media, but their tactics and strategies don’t apply to you.  Every business is different, so your social media outreach and online marketing in Tulsa have to be adapted to your business model and audience.

Establishing Guidelines for Employees

Depending on the size of your company, you may want to protect your brand through online marketing in Tulsa by limiting what your employees can say or do in social media.  Supplying employees with guidelines on how they social media for professional and personal profiles can help support positive branding and online marketing.

In most cases, the guidelines are more like reminders than hard and fast rules

Establishing Guidelines for Social Teams

If you have internal or external people managing your social media profiles, it pays to have social media guidelines in place.  This shows them how to best represent your brand, how to be positive, the tone and voice to use, reference links to utilize, where to pull stories and data, topics to avoid, political stance, global implications of their actions, and of course how to respond to negative feedback and crisis situations.

Respond to Crisis Incidents

Guidelines can help team members and social media managers recognize how to respond to an incident, but because these incidents can grow out of proportion quickly it’s often best for you to stay involved.  Establish, in your guidelines, how you will respond to social media attacks and other assaults on your brand or online marketing in Tulsa.  Once you have clear guidelines on how you react you can easily get a handle on the situation without over-reacting or letting emotions cloud your decisions.

An example of a quick-response strategy to a crisis in social media or online marketing in Tulsa:

  • Ultra-transparency
  • Dialogue, as well as the right message
  • A team able to provide a rapid response
  • And knowing when to call in public relations professionals experienced in social media crisis management

Social Media Guidelines for Small Business

A small company working on strategies for online marketing in Tulsa may not need a 20 page set of guidelines on the use of social media.  If it’s just one individual (you) then it doesn’t need to be so complex.  Establishing some guidelines, however, can make management of your social media much easier.  That includes crisis management, topics to focus on, and personal guidelines to ensure you maintain a consistent tone and presence among your followers.

At the very least, incorporating social media guidelines into your online marketing in Tulsa will help you stay focused, benchmark your progress, evaluate your needs and improve your time investment in social media.