Social Media Policy Analysis and Recommendation for Sunshine 100

This report, prepared for Sunshine 100, a company specializing in responsible foods, analyzes the significance of social media marketing and its contrast with traditional marketing methods. It delves into the challenges of developing a social media strategy, emphasizing the importance of knowing the target audience and selecting appropriate platforms. The report highlights the advantages of social media, such as improved customer engagement and brand publicity, while also addressing potential risks, including image damage and legal issues. It recommends a comprehensive social media policy encompassing rules, responsibilities, legal and security considerations, and accountability. The report also suggests a communication plan template to effectively disseminate the social media policy to employees, ensuring they understand and adhere to the guidelines.

Running Head: SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY 0
SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY
SYSTEM
5/5/2019

SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY 1
TO: Sunshine 100’s
FROM: Jane Wilson
SUBJECT: Social media policy recommendation to the organisation’s management.
DATE: 5th MAY 2019
Jane Wilson the Director of Social Media for Sunshine 100 Should make
the sunshine 100’s firm understand the importance of the social media
marketing and the difference between the social media marketing and
traditional marketing.
Developing a social media strategy
This is one of the main challenges that any organization or a company faces. Creating a social media
strategy difficult. Firstly it is important for any company to know what social media all about is. The
social media strategy of an organization should relate to the marketing strategy of a business as well as
the goals of the organization. The aim of a social media strategy is to guide the actions. It is always
important to choose a social media strategy matrix. Developing a social media strategy is a complex
system (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, and Zickuhr, 2010)
Knowing which social media to use
This is another one of the main issues which an organization or a company needs to decide, the
organization should first know the target audience and should accordingly chose a platform for
marketing. For example 66% of the adults use social media in Australia, 74% of the people are
consumers who use social media for buying product online and 90% of the people like to connect with
the brand directly. Such stats indicate that the brand should be available on social media, however the
main issue is which platform to choose for this a company have to study the target audience and then
study with platform does their target audience use the most (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010).

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Challenges in traditional media tools
Harder to target audience
The modern technology helps the marketing people to know their customer base or the target audience
by the tools they use to collect the information about visitors. Print and broadcast outlets give out
media kits to the audience with demographics but if once the magazine is delivered or mailed or an add
is broadcast no one can know who saw , read or view the ad.
Less information
The message delivered by the traditional marketing is limited in comparison to the new form of
marketing. People are more likely to get attracted by a click of banner or a link and not by newspaper
ads or magazines.
Jane Wilson the Director of Social Media for Sunshine 100. should make
the employees understand the importance of social media marketing
and how it helps the firm to grow
Company publicity
Social media helps in connecting with new people, customers and audience it also attracts the
customers to the new services and products of the organization both nationally and locally (Gilbert and
Karahalios, 2009).
Image risk:
If a person has no knowledge of how to use social media then the image of the company would be at
risk at it will create a poor image on the social media. One wrong post of social media can destroy the
image of the company.
Morale boost:
If a company uses social media, the human behavior or the employee behavior changes as well, in a
study it was seen that use of social media is linked to job satisfaction as it allows the employees to take
short breaks in a day which increase the productivity.

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Builds relationship
Social media can help in building good and strong relationship between the employees and the
customers. When there is a strong bond between the customers and the employees the company works
more efficiently (Asur and Huberman, 2010).
Jane Wilson the Director of Social Media for Sunshine 100 should take the
following components to make the social media policy
1. Rules and regulations
These things include the expectations of the company from the employee on a social media
platform for example: a lot of company policies ask the employees to swear not to state
controversial opinions about the company on the social media (Mangold and Faulds, 2009).
2. Roles and responsibility
Under this come the specific roles of people. This includes the specific social media
responsibility for example the guidelines of the brand (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013) . The social
media roles and responsibilities includes
 Staff training
 Social media monitoring
 Legal and security concerns
 Customer service
 Social engagements
 Crisis response
 Message approval
3. Potential legal risk
A lot of risks are involved when it comes to social media, social media policy should involve ways
to handle those risk (Perrin, 2015). The legal risks vary from country to country. Some of the
things that are included in this policy are:
 Crediting sources
 Employee disclaimers
 Privacy and disclosure procedures

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4. Security risk
The policy should include thing such as:
 Keep software and devices updated
 How to identify an attack
 Create a secure password and set 2 factors of authentication
 Avoid attacks, scams and spams
5. Accountability
When any kind of issue happens in a company, the first mistake is of an employee. As an
employee is responsible for publishing things online. Company should make the employees
understand that they are posting on the behalf of the company and not on the personal
channels and hence any wrong action can make the company suffer (Agichtein, Castillo, Donato,
Gionis and Mishne, 2009) .
Jane Wilson the Director of Social Media for Sunshine 100. should make
the communication plan template in order to make the employees
understand the importance of social media policy
Communication plan template is a very effective and efficient way of communication of any project. It is
a strategy that helps in outlining the strategy of an organization’s target audience and the message that
the organization wants to pass on. The communication plan template can also be made for the
employees. Below is the communication plan for the sunshine 100 company for to discuss the social
media policy plan with the employees
Timing 12:00 P.M.
Audience  Brain Jones the HR manger.
 Judith Pringle, the Director of finance
 Other employees of the organization
Sender Jane Wilson
Key message  Positive attitude towards your job
 Courtesy
 Think before you post
 Respect copyright

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 Avoid revealing personal information
Desired outcome  Awareness towards social media policies
Medium  Letter to the employees
 Notice on the website
 Meeting with the employees
Material  Mail
 Meeting
Frequency 3-4 times a moth

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References
Agichtein, E., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Gionis, A. and Mishne, G. (2009) February. Finding high-quality
content in social media. In Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on web search and data
mining (pp. 183-194). ACM.
Asur, S. and Huberman, B.A. (2010) August. Predicting the future with social media. In Proceedings of
the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology-
Gilbert, E. and Karahalios, K. (2009) April. Predicting tie strength with social media. In Proceedings of the
SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 211-220). ACM.
Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A. and Zickuhr, K. (2010) Social Media & Mobile Internet Use among Teens
and Young Adults. Millennials. Pew internet & American life project.
Mangold, W.G. and Faulds, D.J. ( 2009) Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion
mix. Business horizons, 52(4), pp.357-365.
Perrin, A. (2015) Social media usage: 2005-2015.
Van Dijck, J. and Poell, T. (2013) Understanding social media logic. Media and communication, 1(1),
pp.2-14.
Xiang, Z. and Gretzel, U. (2010) Role of social media in online travel information search. Tourism
management, 31(2), pp.179-188.Volume 01 (pp. 492-499). IEEE Computer Society.