More and more B2B companies are finally getting themselves organized, drafting governance policies, creating social media guidelines and adding staff to build social business strategy. Employees of all kinds with various roles want to help. For publicly held companies, this creates both a boon and a risk scenario when it comes to sharing other peoples content.   And, while we understand you are getting everyone trained on how to behave on social media for the company, what happens with those active “personal” accounts you may or may not know about?

To share or not to share?

For those public companies, quarterly earnings webcasts create their own challenge. You should inform your employees that they should not retweet or share the articles that are published  from analysts about reasons to buy your company stock.  You certainly don’t want to do this from company branded pages. Sharing this kind of information might connect the company to an external investment view and that is what most companies want to avoid. Even it its good news.

Check those links

Understanding the implications of sharing links to other peoples content is something that anyone in the social space should be aware of.  While you are on your own personal profiles on third party sites, do you click on every link that people in your network share? Or do you “trust” that they would only share appropriate material?

My recommendation is that you always click through a link, view images, and watch the video from even the most reputable source to see what they are sharing.  What it says, how it applies to you, and how it applies to any organizations that you are representing are the important points .  If you don’t have time to check, don’t share it until you do.

Avoid Politics

Be careful about sharing info to any company owned pages with any type of political connotations. That might include retweeting a picture that had any known political figure names included. If in doubt, check in with your External/Governmental Affairs person or corporate communication executive.   Make sure that what you share on your company pages has supporting reasons that follow your business strategy (and social strategy) behind it. This advice also reflects on your personal pages as the lines between business and social spaces gets blurred for many.

Opinions Expressed are my Own

If you do have your own third party networking profiles out there, now would be a good time to add the disclaimer “Opinions Expressed Are My Own.”. And don’t forget that disclosing you work for a company visibly when you tweet or share about them from your personal accounts is required.

Right now, instead of trying to figure out what to tweet, we should think about how millions of people may come back to our company websites after each earnings report. They will be researching more info about your company. This should be a reminder that your company and product content is even more important each and every time some of this good news hits the wires.

Stay tuned for other best practice tips and updates on the social business strategies we are working on. In the meantime, if you have some questions, ask away to be answered here in later posts.