Cyber Times International Journal of Technology & Management

The purpose of this research paper is to study the best practices in social media usage policies of various organizations. With their growing popularity, organizations across the world are still debating on whether it is desirable and practical to allow their employees to access social media sites from the workplace. Some feel that this leads to loss of productivity, while the other school of thought is that it keeps the employees connected with their peers as well as keeps them abreast with emerging trends that can add value to the organization. With social media becoming an extremely important mode of communication and social interaction, managing it is becoming a difficult task for organizations. They are in a constant dilemma in deciding the extent of freedom to be provided to the employees for accessing these social media platforms Organizations have over time defined guidelines for usage and leverage of various social media tools by their employees. The focus of the study is on companies in the Information and Technology sector which have operations in India. The policies are studied from publicly available information, primarily on the corporate websites. The paper identifies the best practices in social media usage policy formation for the IT sector. The study will help in formulation of the usage guidelines/policies for other organizations and can also be extrapolated and used across multiple sectors. Based on the study, standard practices for the do’s and don’ts in this kind of policy formulation will be concluded.