Social media like anything has many facets. Some of them you may not be aware of, yet as an employer perhaps you should be.

Social media – the good, likeable bit

Social media offers your business the opportunity to experience greater revenue, increased customer engagement, and invaluable goodwill by easily and effectively engaging customers, promoting your products and services, and developing an online interactive brand that can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The bad bit – these benefits are not without legal risks.

One the flip side, your business could be exposed to lawsuits if your social media is not managed properly. There are many laws, regulations, and social media site rules that govern the social media activities of your business and its employees. These laws apply equally to businesses of all shapes, sizes, and across all industries.

1. As an employer, you are responsible for your employees’ actions when performed within the scope of their employment. Basically, you could be held liable for something that your employee has done on social media e.g. defamatory, discriminatory, or harassing social media messages, comments, or tweets.
2. You could also be sued if your employee leaks sensitive customer information or improperly uses your intellectual property and trade secrets (and this may apply even if the employee commits the offense at your office or at home using their personal social media accounts).
3. Discrimination – you could be sued if you DON’T search your employees on social media before engaging them. ‘Negligent hiring’ holds a business responsible if an employee harms someone during their employment and as an employer you could have learned about that person’s likelihood of harmful behaviour by checking their social media.
4. Discrimination – you could be sued if you DO search your employees on social media before engaging them and it can be proven that you based not hiring them on age, race, sex, origin etc.

How do you avoid these risks?

If you have employees, you must implement a social media policy and compliance procedure to help protect your company’s reputation, business relationships, trade secrets, and intellectual property.

The ugly.. 

A massive law suit for not taking this seriously.