Many employers (65%) actively encourage the use of social media for work-related activities, according to research by DLA Piper.
The report, Knowing your tweet from your trend: keeping pace with social media in the workplace, addresses the problems that employers face keeping up with social media and the procedures that can be put in to place to mitigate the potential risk of employees engaging with these online platforms.
More than three-quarters (76%) of employers polled said they have a social media presence, with 86% on Facebook, 78% on LinkedIn and 62% on Twitter.
The reasons for this are varied: brand awareness (80%), marketing (60%), recruitment (42%), employee communication (39%), employee engagement (37%) and team working (28%).
Only a small proportion (25%) of respondents have a standalone, dedicated social media policy, and less than half (43%) have a social media policy, which existed alongside another, such as an HR policy.†
Kate Hodgkiss, a partner in DLA Piper's employment practice and author of the report, said: "The rise of social media in the early 2000s has more recently filtered through to the work environment and changed business attitudes to communication.
“There is widespread recognition that social media is not just a tool for marketing, but something that needs to be considered by all aspects of a business; from HR, to risk, to the upper echelons of corporate management.
“Our respondents recognise the benefits of social media to get their messages out to a wide audience, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods and far more quickly.”
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