Social Media Policies have found their entrance into large corporation but the small and especially the medium sized companies have not created and implemented such social media policies.
Earlier this year PayScale released some results about the adoption of Social Media Policies in the USA (http://mashable.com/2012/06/10/employer-social-media/). The conclusion was that over 50% of the companies had a formal social media policy. But how do Belgian businesses match up to these numbers?
A recent survey (October 2012) done via Vanguard Leadership has revealed that only 1 company in 5 has a social media policy in Belgium. And since Belgium is a country of Small and Medium sized business, we can conclude that the 20% of companies that have a social media policy are mainly the larger companies.
The same survey uncovered that 65% of the employees accessed Facebook, 52% LinkedIn and 53% Twitter daily during work hours. You would think that social media policies would be more common since employers are worried about their employees wasting time or damaging the reputation of their company on social media.
A first conclusion is that companies are not always aware that their employees are very active on social media. Though these companies are aware that such a policy is a must they do not create or implement a policy or guidelines until they have an “accident” which leads to reputation loss. Over the course of the year we have witnessed several of these examples (e.g. Ikea in Belgium – http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=GVB3M9AGE) where a social media policy is created after the reputation damage was detected.
More information to come about the results of this survey in next blog posts.
Notes about the survey: Over 200 companies were surveyed. About 50% have less than 50 employees, 30% have less than 250 employees and and 20% were larger than 500 employees.
Tags: belgium, blog, business, employment, facebook, IT policies, Leadership, linkedin, Medium business, mic adam, policy, Small Business, social media, social media guidelines, social media policy, survey, twitter, vanguard leadership
