SOC1AL MED1A COMMANDMENTS
1. THE '3 P’S'
The three p’s stand for Personal, Professional, and Passion and these are three things that should be qualities of any of your social media sites. You need your sites to be personal so that they stand out. Be professional; stick to your craft. Post content you are passionate about: entertainment, sports, or even politics. Make your social media presence say something about you. It will also help your followers feel a sense of connectivity to you as well.
2. IF YOU WOULDN’T SAY IT OUT LOUD, DON’T POST IT
Self-explanatory. If you wouldn’t speak it, don’t tweet it. Don’t be that person who hides behind a keyboard.
I’m sure Justine Sacco didn’t mean harm by this, but her name is now forever associated with this post.
3. VERIFY BEFORE RETWEETING
There are many cases where news outlets don’t fact check. Make sure you do! You don’t want to be the journalist who’s named is tarnished because you gave your followers wrong information. Being first isn’t more important than being right.
Many news outlets got backlash after reporting the wrong person of a controversial shooting
4. KEEP IT SFW
Safe for Work! Keep it PG or PG-13. Nobody likes vulgar material.
5. CATER TO YOUR AUDIENCE BUT REMEMBER ANYONE CAN SEE WHAT YOU POST
Keep in mind that the people who follow you are not the only ones who view your work. Anytime someone comes to your page, they are deciding whether or not to follow you and trust you as a source for information. Fight for those followers. Make their decision to follow worth their while.
6. BEWARE OF CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Sometimes you may run into a situation where you will be asked to write something on someone you know or something close to your heart. Try to avoid talking about people you know personally.
7. BE TRANSPARENT
Don’t lock your pages. What do you have to hide?
8. DON’T STEAL TWEETS
Credit other’s work. Don’t say you wrote something or found something when you didn’t. A lot of trouble (such as plagiarism accusations) can come your way.
9. HAVE A VOICE THAT ISN’T OFFENSIVE
Don’t be scared to say how you feel about something, at the end of the day it’s your page. But be “politically correct”.
10. POST RESPONSIBLY
Anything you wouldn’t want your mom or boss to see, don’t let your social media followers see.
Here are 10 people who learned how social media can get you fired
11. DON’T DELETE TWEETS/POSTS
If you make a spelling mistake or a grammar mistake, fine. Quickly delete and fix. But if you make an informative mistake, instead of deleting, own up to the mistake. Don’t delete because at the end of the day, you can’t really delete anything from the Internet. Screenshots live forever.