Social media guidelines are instructions and recommendations for how employees, partners, and collaborators should represent a brand on social media.

While employees are the primary audience, they’re just as useful for agencies, contractors, and influencers who speak on your brand’s behalf.

Think of social media guidelines as your brand’s manual for social media best practices. They should outline how to behave on social media in a way that’s positive and safe.

Social media guidelines are not the same as a social media policy or a style guide. More on how those three documents differ in the next section.

That said, keeping all three documents together makes them far easier to use (and actually follow). Want to learn more? Take Hootsuite Academy’s free course Implementing social media governance within your organization.

Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media guidelines template to quickly and easily create recommendations for your company and employees.

The short version: guidelines recommend, policies require, and style guides standardize. All three serve different purposes, and most organizations need all three.

If you only have budget and bandwidth for one document, start with guidelines. They’re the most useful to the most people, and they give you a foundation to build a formal policy on later.

Social media guidelines matter because they protect your brand, ensure compliance with regulations, and empower employees to participate online with confidence.

Clear social media guidelines help protect your brand from risk, especially when they work alongside a solid social media policy.

They cover how everyday social activity connects back to brand reputation and even compliance .

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