Last month, I was invited to speak at the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) convention on the topic of internal social media policies. Entitled “Who’s in Charge?” my presentation (which you can watch here) covered the issues that can arise when you have multiple employees posting to your company or organization’s social media accounts. Though there are some nuances within college athletics, the problems I discussed are consistent across nearly every industry.

Many companies have social media policies regarding how employees use their personal accounts, covering such things as not disclosing confidential client information. However, far fewer have internal policies that govern how the company accounts are managed and utilized.

Although every situation is unique, there are six primary reasons I think every company needs an internal social media policy to govern usage of its own accounts: