5 Steps To An Athletic Department’s Social Media Policy

Buy them or write them yourself, update them every year, stay ahead of the curve and prove to your institution that you are proactive on the topic. Everybody needs guidelines and most everybody needs rules to follow, especially in such an ever changing landscape as social media. Most schools who currently have a Social Media Policy, keep it to a few pages. Well written Social Media Guidelines can only help the student athlete, coaches, administration as well as the institution itself.

Here are our 5 most important steps to creating your Social Media Guidelines for an Athletic Department.

1) On Topic & Basics – Stay on topic and keep to the basics. UNC does a nice job of summarizing their message to student athletes. This does not need to be a complicated document, in fact, most existing examples are basic in nature. Remember the audience who will be reading the guidelines. Keep it relevant while simple and basic in content. It is not a legal document, just guidelines.

2) Goals & Embrace – You may even title this section “The Purpose”. Holy Cross explains to the student athletes what the goals and expectations are of the student athlete and the athletic department as a whole. College students appreciate being involved in an issue and sharing this information may sound trivial but once you have buy-in, things often go more smoothly. Some schools even require their athletes to accept the guidelines by signing them each year.

3) Consequences – If you are strict and vigilant in your message, your student athletes will respect the guidelines and not want to deal with the consequences, after all, there is a lot at stake. It is surprising how many schools do not list the ramifications of rules broken. USC however, does a nice job of explaining the consequences, step by step.

4) Be Specific – Everybody loves to find a loophole in rules or guidelines, so don’t give it to them. By listing examples, everybody is very clear on your message. Lehigh lists their examples on line and makes it easy for everybody to follow. Be specific and there will be no room for interpretation.

5) Monitor – There are two ways to monitor social media and both are very effective. Monitoring the overall “brand” of your program using a variety of tools can be very effective. Anybody using poor judgement will come up quickly, assuming there posts are geared towards the schools athletic program. More specifically, you can monitor individual accounts. Again there are agencies and tools to do this or, you can do it yourself. UNC asks each that one coach from each team follow their respective players’ accounts. Regardless, you can never be too safe!