Creating social media community or terms of use guidelines

The most common barrier to entry of most businesses getting on social media is “what happens if people post content or comments we don’t like”.

I highly recommend that businesses publish a Social Media “Community” or “Terms of Use” guidelines that covers other people’s activities on your social media profiles. It isn’t a fail-safe and it won’t protect you completely from other people’s posts, but it will give you a point of reference especially when you need to delete someone’s comments or block followers completely.

1. Create simple Social Media terms of use guidelines;

2. Publish it on your website and on all your social media profiles;

3. Refer to the guidelines whenever someone comments or posts inappropriately on your social media profiles.

Example of simple social media terms of use:

The best social media community guidelines I’ve come across are the ones published by Ergon Energy on their website and on their Facebook Page, but they also include reference to the individual social media platforms’ own terms of use policies.

We also have a pretty standard Terms of Use on our own Facebook Page that you could use as a guide to creating your own version. (LIKE our page whilst your there :) )

Obviously you’d want to consult your legal advisors when putting together any organisational policies that may have legal implications, but you could use a simple one like Ergon Energy’s to get you started.

Simple example of terms of use for Facebook – publish on your Facebook About page or as a Facebook Note:

Social Media Community Guidelines or Terms of Use

To ensure everyone feels welcome, please keep in mind our guidelines:

1. Respect others – Please only publish comments and posts that are NOT offensive, obscene or hurtful.

2. Protect privacy – Please don’t share yours or other people’s personal information on our timeline.

3. Keep on topic – Please only publish comments and posts that are relevant to the topic of this page or current conversations. 

We reserve the right at our sole discretion to delete any posts or comments that don’t comply with our guidelines, or which we otherwise feel are inappropriate, overly self-promotional or spammy and we will block users if required.

Content posted by our followers/fans on our page does not represent the official views of this business.

By using our Facebook page, you also agree to comply with Facebook’s terms of use, including its privacy policy: www.facebook.com/policies.

Contact us directly if you have any questions regarding these guidelines.

Thank you for visiting our page and we look forward to connecting with you!

Although publishing a terms of use won’t protect you from all events that might happen on your social media profiles, it will give you a good guideline when making decisions when moderating other people’s posts and comments, and it will give you a point of reference if you need to defend yourself against the backlash of deleting and/or banning a user.

Have you seen any good examples of social media community or terms of use guidelines? Please share them in the comments: