Social media guidelines: How to write them (+ free template)

Strategy

Learn the difference between a social media policy and social media guidelines, check out some real-life examples, and grab a free template.

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Key takeaways

• Social media guidelines protect your brand. They set clear expectations for how employees, contractors, agencies, and influencers represent your organization online, which reduces legal, compliance, and reputation risk.
• Strong guidelines cover more than tone and voice. The best documents address disclosure, privacy, cybersecurity, copyright, accessibility, AI use, and how to handle negativity.
• A step-by-step writing process makes guidelines easier to enforce. Pulling in legal, HR, and comms early means fewer rewrites later and faster sign-off.
• Pre-approved content removes the guesswork for employees. Tools like Hootsuite Amplify give your team a library of ready-to-share posts so advocacy feels safe and simple.

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.

What’s the difference between social media guidelines, a social media policy, and a style guide?

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

Here’s how they compare side by side:

Social media guidelines

Social media policy

Style guide

Purpose

Recommends how to behave on social media

Sets enforceable rules and consequences

Standardizes voice, visuals, and formatting

Audience

All employees, contractors, agencies, influencers

All employees, with HR and legal weight behind it

Social team, content creators, designers

Typical owner

Marketing or communications

Legal, HR, or compliance

Brand or creative team

Tone

Practical and encouraging

Formal and precise

Instructional and detailed

Update frequency

Annually, or when platforms and regulations change

Annually, or when laws change

When brand assets or messaging change

Enforcement level

Advisory, with escalation paths

Binding, tied to disciplinary process

Advisory for internal consistency

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.

Here are the biggest benefits of social media guidelines:

How do social media guidelines protect your brand?

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. From the basics to the high-stakes stuff, good guidelines make it clear that what employees do on social media really does reflect on the brand.

These risks are real. A single post that shares confidential information, misstates a product claim, or skips a required disclosure can trigger a legal review, a regulatory complaint, or unwanted media attention. Guidelines won’t prevent every mistake, but they remove the most common excuse: “I didn’t know.”

How do guidelines keep employees aligned with regulations?

Social media regulations don’t just apply to official brand accounts. They apply to employees, too.

This is obvious in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and finance, but it matters just as much for retail, service, and consumer brands.

For example, the Federal Trade Commission’s social media disclosure guidelines require people to clearly disclose when they’re being paid, gifted products, or otherwise compensated for endorsements. That includes employees, influencers, and partners.

Rules also change. Platform policies, the EU Digital Services Act, and state-level social media laws all shift on their own timelines, which is a good argument for reviewing your guidelines on a set schedule, informed by current social media trends, rather than only when something goes wrong.

To avoid confusion (and costly mistakes), include any relevant regulations directly in your social media guidelines. It’s a good idea to also add specific examples that make the requirements easy for everyone to understand.

How do guidelines encourage brand advocacy?

Every employee is a potential brand ambassador, but not everyone knows exactly what’s okay to share on their own social media.

That’s where social media guidelines come in. They give your team clear guardrails to talk about their work in a way that’s positive, inclusive, and on brand. When people know the rules, they feel more comfortable hyping up your brand (and their work).

A platform like Hootsuite Amplify can make brand advocacy easier. Employees browse a library of pre-approved content, including posts, visuals, and links, then share to their own feeds in seconds. Admins can target content to specific teams or regions and track which posts actually get shared.

It takes the stress out of posting and helps everyone show up confidently online without second-guessing.

Hootsuite Amplify lets employees share pre-approved content to their personal profiles in seconds.

At minimum, a strong social media guidelines document should explain who the guidelines apply to, what types of social media activity they cover, and how employees are expected to act online.

It can also include practical guardrails around privacy, copyright, cybersecurity, accessibility, AI use, and disclosure.

Here’s a quick map of the sections covered below:

• The 5 W’s
• High-level dos and don’ts
• Disclosure and transparency
• Privacy and confidentiality
• Cybersecurity
• Accessibility and inclusivity
• How to respond to negativity
• AI and generative AI use
• Channel-specific guidelines
• Links to relevant policy documents

Go ahead and tailor any part of this to fit your brand. After all, every industry is different.

Or, start with our free social media guidelines template, which you’ll find below.

What are the 5 W’s your guidelines should cover?

Strong social media guidelines start with the basics: who, what, when, where, and why. Covering these upfront ensures everyone is on the same page:

The 5 W’s of social media guidelines

• Who: Clearly state who the guidelines apply to. This is anyone who works with your company, including employees, contractors, agency partners, students, or influencers. Be specific.
• What: Clarify what counts as company-related social media use. This typically includes posts from official social media accounts, work-related content shared from personal social media accounts, and sometimes personal social media use during work hours or on company devices.
• When: Add a “last updated” date so people know which version is current and when changes take effect.
• Where: Define what you mean by “social media.” This could include a list of social media channels, official accounts, and branded hashtags. Or, it could be a broader definition that includes platforms like Reddit and Quora.
• Why: Explain why the guidelines exist in the first place. People are much more likely to follow the rules when they understand how they protect both employees and the brand. Touch on any specific compliance requirements that apply to your industry (like HIPAA or FINRA).

What high-level dos and don’ts should you include?

In an ideal world, every employee would read every line of your social media policy and guidelines. In reality, most won’t.

That’s why it helps to lead with a quick, punchy list of basic expectations. Think of this as your social media code of conduct at a glance.

Don’t go into too much detail here, since you’ll do that in later sections. Here’s a sample list you can copy and paste or tweak for your specific needs:

• DO mention the company as your employer in your social media bio (if you talk about company matters)
• DON’T engage with competitors or customers in an inappropriate way
• DO share company social media posts, events, and stories
• DON’T share company secrets or confidential information about your colleagues or customers
• DO express your own opinion, just make sure it’s clear you’re not speaking on behalf of the company
• DON’T comment on legal matters pertaining to the company
• DO report harassment you’ve experienced or noticed
• DON’T engage with trolls or negative comments
• DO disclose when content was created or edited with AI tools
• DON’T use AI to generate content that impersonates real people or fabricates endorsements

Disclosure and transparency

Employees should always be clear about when they’re speaking for themselves versus on behalf of your company.

Adding a disclosure to their social profile or bio is a good start. Something like “All opinions expressed are my own” makes it clear that these are not official viewpoints, but personal views, like this university strategist and instructor does here.

However, when employees post about company-related topics, disclosure isn’t optional. The FTC’s Endorsement Guides require them to identify themselves as employees in the post itself, not just in their bio. That’s a rule, not a suggestion.

To make this easy (and consistent), work with your legal or compliance team to approve a few clear, copy-and-paste disclosures. Including those directly in your social media guidelines helps employees get it right without guessing.

Privacy and confidentiality

Remind your team that confidential company information is confidential off the clock, too. Some of the biggest no-nos for sharing on social are:

• Info about coworkers or customers
• Financial disclosures
• Upcoming products that haven’t been officially announced
• Private communications
• Research and development intel

Clarify that privacy and confidentiality should be respected across all social media platforms. That also includes photos taken at your workplace or workplace events. These can be especially challenging for organizations subject to HIPAA or FERPA.

It’s also good practice to remind employees to review their social media profile settings to make sure their personal information remains protected.

Include a reminder in your social media posting guidelines to respect ownership from:

• Intellectual property
• Trademarks
• And other relevant laws.

When in doubt, the rule of thumb is relatively simple: if it’s not yours, and you don’t have permission, don’t post it. (Except through native resharing functions.)

AI-generated images and text raise additional copyright questions that courts and regulators are still working through. When in doubt, have your legal team weigh in before posting.

We’ve got a full post on image copyright guidelines that you can link to or learn from.

Cybersecurity

Your employees may already be vigilant about phishing scams and the like. Still, it never hurts to review cyber-safety basics, especially if you collect information about customers or clients.

According to the FTC, social media was the second most common way fraudsters contacted victims in 2025 when measured by the volume of reports involving a loss, accounting for 28% of those reports, behind websites or apps at 31%. The FTC also flagged social media as the costliest contact method by total dollars lost. Either way, employee accounts sit squarely in the risk zone, which is why cybersecurity deserves a clear spot in your social media guidelines.

We’ve got a whole post on social media security that can help you craft your social media guidelines on this front.

Here’s a quick refresh of smart cybersecurity habits:

• Only activate geolocation services on apps when necessary
• Choose strong passwords
• Use a different password for every social account
• Never share passwords with others. Create separate access credentials for all team members who access corporate accounts
• Use two-factor (or multi-factor) authentication to login to social networks
• Limit the personal and professional information you share, and avoid online “quizzes” that fish for password hints
• Use personal credentials for personal accounts (rather than your corporate email)
• Make sure your internet connection is secure, and be cautious on public Wi-Fi networks
• Do not download or click on suspicious content

Accessibility and inclusivity

It’s important for every employer and brand to promote accessibility and inclusivity on and off social media. It also helps employees feel supported.

Here are some common accessibility and inclusivity guidelines for social media:

• Use inclusive pronouns when appropriate (they/them/theirs/folks)
• Add alt text to images and captions or subtitles to videos
• Be thoughtful about representation in social media imagery. This includes stock imagery, emojis, and branded visuals.
• Don’t make assumptions about gender, race, experience, or ability
• Avoid gender- or race-specific emojis when they aren’t necessary
• Feel free to share your preferred pronouns (and always respect the pronouns of others)
• Use title case for hashtags (this makes them more legible for screen readers)
• Report and remove any comments that are sexist, racist, ableist, ageist, homophobic, or hateful to any group or person from your owned social channels
• Consider how content may be perceived by different segments of your target audience
• Use AI-assisted alt text and auto-captions as a starting point, then review and edit them before publishing. Automated tools often miss names, context, and technical terms.
• Take advantage of platform-native accessibility features, like Instagram’s custom alt text field and LinkedIn’s closed captioning upload

Find more accessibility and inclusivity resources here.

How to respond to negativity

Your guidelines should clearly define how employees (and your social media team) are expected to handle trolls, harassment, or negative comments. Should they ignore or escalate? And when is it okay to respond directly?

For example, it may be appropriate to acknowledge a concern publicly, then move the conversation to direct messages for resolution.

Anyone who manages comments on your owned channels should also have a clear content moderation policy to lean on. It should cover when to hide, delete, or respond to comments, and who needs to be looped in for sensitive situations. You can link to that policy here if needed.

Finally, make sure everyone knows how to report issues they come across. If support is needed, be explicit about where to go and who to contact.

Providing protocol and tools helps your team nip problems in the bud before they grow into a full-blown social media crisis.

AI and generative AI use

Most teams are already using AI to draft captions, resize creative, or summarize comments. Your guidelines should say what’s allowed, what needs review, and what’s off limits, so people aren’t guessing.

Here’s what to cover in your AI-generated content section:

• Approved tools: List the AI tools employees can use for work-related content, and note which ones are not approved for handling customer or confidential data
• Disclosure expectations: Spell out when AI involvement needs to be disclosed in the post itself, especially for synthetic imagery, voice, or video. Several platforms now require AI labels on realistic synthetic media, so check each network’s current rules
• Human review: Require a person to review and fact-check AI-generated copy before it publishes. AI tools confidently invent statistics, product details, and quotes
• Customer responses: Clarify whether AI can draft replies to customers, who approves them, and which topics always need a human (complaints, health or financial questions, legal matters)
• Likeness and impersonation: Prohibit using AI to recreate the voice or appearance of real people, including employees, customers, and competitors, without written consent
• Data input limits: State clearly that confidential company information, unreleased product details, and customer data should never be pasted into public AI tools

Channel-specific guidelines

Expectations shift from platform to platform, and your guidelines should acknowledge that. A LinkedIn comment and a TikTok duet carry different risks and different norms.

You don’t need an exhaustive section for every network. A short list of considerations per major platform is usually enough:

• LinkedIn: The most common place employees discuss work. Clarify how to describe their role, what company information is fair game, and whether they should tag the company page
• Instagram: Heavy on visuals, so copyright and likeness rules matter most here. Cover photo consent for workplace images and alt text requirements
• TikTok: More creative freedom, more risk of context collapse. Note expectations around trending audio licensing, filming on company property, and disclosing employment in the video or caption
• X: Fast-moving and public. Set expectations around replying to critics, quote-posting competitors, and when to escalate instead of engage
• Reddit and community forums: Users are highly sensitive to undisclosed promotion. Require employees to disclose their affiliation before discussing company products
• Threads, Bluesky, and emerging platforms: Note that guidelines apply to any public social platform, including new ones, so you don’t need to rewrite the document every time a network launches

Links to relevant policy documents

Your social media guidelines shouldn’t live in a vacuum. Link out to related resources like your social media policy, style guide, and community guidelines so people can easily find deeper detail when they need it.

You may also want to include links to broader brand documents, like your brand identity guidelines or employee handbook.

If you offer social media training or resources, include those as well. And don’t forget your employee advocacy program. Giving staff access to pre-approved content makes it easier (and safer) for them to share and participate.

Writing social media guidelines takes less time than most teams expect, as long as you line up the right stakeholders early. Here’s the process in eight steps:

How to write social media guidelines in 8 steps

• Audit what you already have
• Assemble your stakeholders
• Define the scope
• Draft the core sections
• Add real examples
• Send it for legal and HR review
• Publish and distribute
• Schedule a review cadence

1. Audit what you already have

Start by collecting every document that touches social media at your organization. That might include an employee handbook section, a brand style guide, a crisis comms plan, or an old policy nobody has opened since 2019.

Note what’s current, what’s contradictory, and what’s missing. You’ll often find you’re not starting from zero.

2. Assemble your stakeholders

Social media guidelines touch legal, HR, communications, IT security, and the social team. Bring them in before you draft, not after.

Ask each group one question: what’s the risk you worry about most? Legal will flag disclosure and copyright. HR will raise harassment and personal account boundaries. IT will want account security rules. Those answers become your section list.

3. Define the scope

Decide who the guidelines apply to and what counts as company-related activity. This is where the 5 W’s framework earns its keep.

Be specific about personal accounts. Vague scope language is the most common reason guidelines get ignored or challenged.

4. Draft the core sections

Work through the sections outlined earlier: dos and don’ts, disclosure, privacy, copyright, cybersecurity, accessibility, negativity, AI use, and channel-specific notes.

Write in plain language. If a sentence needs a legal degree to parse, rewrite it. The goal is a document people actually read, not one that only satisfies a compliance checkbox.

5. Add real examples

Abstract rules are easy to misinterpret. Concrete examples are not.

For every rule that could be read two ways, show a compliant post and a non-compliant one. Copy-and-paste disclosure language is especially useful here, since it removes the judgment call entirely.

6. Send it for legal and HR review

Your legal team needs to confirm the regulatory language is accurate for your industry and jurisdictions. HR needs to confirm the enforcement language aligns with existing employment agreements and labor law.

Build in two weeks for this step. It almost always takes longer than planned, particularly in regulated industries where errors carry real legal and financial consequences.

7. Publish and distribute

Put the final document somewhere people can find it without asking: your intranet, your onboarding packet, your HR portal. Then announce it, rather than quietly uploading it.

Pair the announcement with a short walkthrough. A 20-minute session covering the top five things employees need to know will do more than a 15-page PDF ever will.

8. Schedule a review cadence

Set a recurring annual review before you close the project. Add a trigger-based review too, so platform policy changes, new regulations, or a social media incident prompt an off-cycle update.

Log the “last updated” date on the document itself so nobody is working from a stale version.

If you’d rather not start from a blank page, use our free social media guidelines template as your foundation. It includes prompts for every section covered above, from the 5 W’s through AI use and channel-specific notes.

Fill in the bracketed sections with your company name, industry regulations, and escalation contacts, then send it to legal for review. Most teams get to a first draft in an afternoon.

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

To get a sense of the different kinds of social media guidelines out there, we’ve divided these real-world examples by industry.

1. Education: McGill University

Like many other post-secondary institutions, the University of Northern Georgia notes that its social media guidelines apply to both employees and students. This helps protect the university’s brand by setting expectations for behavior across the board.

McGill University gets into finer detail, organizing its guidance around a set of general principles that cover accuracy, respect, inclusiveness, privacy, accessibility, and brand identity. (McGill may restructure this page, so check the current version before citing it.)

2. Government: Ontario Public Service

The social media guidelines for the Ontario Public Service are broken down into four different use categories. They include common-sense guiding principles backed by this important caveat:

“Even if you use disclaimers like ‘the opinions expressed are my own,’ you are still responsible for what you say. What you say publicly may impact you professionally.”

3. Healthcare: Horizon Health Network

Horizon Health Network is a great reminder that social media guidelines don’t need to be long to be effective. Their guidelines fit on a single page, but still cover reputation, professionalism, and personal use of social media.

One standout line says it all: “If you do identify your affiliation to Horizon (on any social platform) make sure your activities are consistent with the high standards of your profession and Horizon.”

Providence Health & Services combines its official-use social media policy with its social media guidelines for personal use.

4. Luxury retail: Chanel

5. Technology: Intel

6. Nonprofit: American Red Cross

7. Financial services: Vanguard

Here’s what works: