We recently held a social media etiquette session with the account service team here at CM and thought we’d share our insights!
Basic Rule of Thumb:
If you wouldn’t say it at a cocktail party in front of 35 people, don’t say it on Facebook or Twitter.
- Our clients may see your updates. It’s okay to show your personality, but remember who’s reading!
- CurrentMarketing is an aspect of your personality; you may think what you write is your personal thought, but it reflects on your CurrentMarketing identity as well.
- No typos or incorrect grammar PLEASE! This is very important, especially if you are administering a group or tweeting.
- Use proper capitalization and punctuation.
- Don’t use abbreviations like L8 and 4U. Those are for texting.
- If you can’t say it in 140 characters, don’t use Twitter. Write a blog entry.
- Be transparent. When you use your personal Twitter or Facebook account to tweet about a client’s product, make your relationship to the product clear.
- Come up for air! Pause between updates. You shouldn’t tweet more than once every fifteen minutes, unless you are replying to another tweet. And, most of us should not tweet more than 2-3 times PER DAY. You shouldn’t update your Facebook status more than once during the workday hours – after hours, have at it.
- Post something at least 2 times per week. You don’t want a client to look you up, only to find that you have never tweeted, or your last tweet was more than a month ago. Same goes with Facebook.
- Keep small conversations private. If you know someone well enough to have their mobile number, text them or send them an instant message through Google chat. A good rule here – if your conversation requires more than 2 messages back and forth, move it to a more direct and one-to-one method of messaging.
- Limit the use of emoticons – most people find them annoying. 😉
- Type your post, then read it twice before hitting submit.
- Avoid posts like “waiting for 5:00” or “just working for the weekend.” It impacts our culture negatively and makes our clients think we don’t enjoy working at CurrentMarketing (and we all love it here!).
- Never “poke” a client. Never.
- Choose your profile picture carefully. The general thinking among social media discussions is that if you wouldn’t be proud to show your picture to your mom and dad, you shouldn’t post it.
- Be careful about using our client’s names when discussing the work we are doing. “Working on a pitch” is good. “Working on a pitch for Papa Johns, who just issued an RFP” is not so good.
- Don’t post something personal unless you want to be asked about it…by everyone. Airing grievances is generally a no-no on Facebook and Twitter – save disagreements for phone, email or a nice meal on your patio.Got any others we should consider?