A Framework for Enterprise Social Media Guidelines

Companies’ adoption of social media has strongly increased in recent years. Managers are challenged to inform their employees about the potentials and the risks associated by using social media in enterprise communication. Providing guidelines on social media usage for employees is twofold: on the one hand guidelines might increase the awareness of risks, on the other hand publishing guidelines might result in a reduced employee’s engagement in social media. In this paper we classified 34 social media guidelines of large enterprises and analyzed them by applying an open coding approach. Based on the analysis of the content we propose a framework that summarizes the most relevant aspects of content in enterprise social media guidelines. Our work helps researchers to better understand the structure and content of social media guidelines. Furthermore, by providing a comprehensive framework and analysis of patterns in social media guidelines, our study supports practioneers in designing or benchmarking their own guidelines.