Buying and selling is a social activity. It involves asking your friends if it’s a good deal or not. It means letting your neighbours know that you have a perfectly good lawnmower up for sale. It asks you to answer your phone and maybe even open you door to new visitors to inspect what you are selling. This is why Used.ca and it’s family of online classified sites have social media top of mind. We feel it’s important to share with you our approach to how we use our online tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more.

Social media has given people around the world a voice to openly discuss, and sometimes provoke discussion. These people could be your neighbours, business owners, charities and other non-profit organizations. We want to listen, learn and participate on those conversations and we make it clear that anyone in our organization is free to engage through social media. We’ve given each of our employee’s & contractors guidelines to be better online citizens, and where they end up participating is up to them. All we ask is that they disclose their usage.

While each employee may wish to participate individually, we do have a number of corporate accounts available, which again, are open to participation by anyone in our organization. For this reason you should notice that we sign everything. You shouldn’t be left wondering who in our organization has posted what. On our blog, we highlight the author with their name and a head shot. On Twitter you’ll notice the use of the carat symbol (“^”) and our initials. On Facebook it’s our first names. For future sites, we could choose to use a number of methods.

These corporate accounts are not meant to “sell” you our products or services. They are intended to be used for information sharing, knowledge gathering and just good ole’ fashioned fun. We will not disclose any private information and will not allow public forums to actively share private information. Any posts in our public forums ( like our facebook wall ) will be moderated just like our sites. All we ask is that you uphold the same standards we give our employees.

As we grow our online conversation, we want you to be empowered to engage with the community we’ve built. Just like our sites, we want to step out of the way and let you speak. It’s still a work in progress, but if you have any expertise and wish to join our team of Social Media experts, or have suggestions and idea’s on our approaches and policies, please email socialmedia@used.ca