Tarte Cosmetics: A Social Media & Crisis Ethical Guide

5 min readDec 5, 2020

At Tarte Cosmetics, it is our dream of uniting glamourous makeup and good-for-you ingredients. Our makeup, skincare, and beauty products have high-performance natural components. Therefore as a cruelty-free and vegan brand, our merchandise is free of parabens, phthalates, sodium lauryl sulfate, gluten, mineral oil, and triclosan.

We are leaders in the beauty industry who strive to find the best, most efficient ingredients worldwide, such as our skin-balancing Amazonian clay and incredibly nourishing, non-greasy maracuja oil. We’re committed to supporting our mission to give back to the environment and educate people further on our brand and products.

For employees who manage our social media platforms, a set of ethical guidelines will help you interact with consumers and adhere to our core principles and ethical standards.

Core Ethical Expectations

Innovation: At Tarte, we encourage all employees to unleash their creativity. We look forward to workers being dynamic, coming up with fresh ideas, and translating them into successful products.

Integrity: At our company, honest and integrity is one of the core values of our foundation. Thus, it creates a strong, trusting relationship with employees, stakeholders, and customers. All employees must demonstrate sound moral and ethical principles and do the right thing, no matter who’s watching.

Teamwork: At Tarte Cosmetics, we work together to further the brand’s prosperity, meet our customers’ needs, and help our corporation win.

At the workforce, we:

We share aims and hold ourselves and each other responsible.
We reach across teams for better results.
We communicate effectively by sharing knowledge, experiences, and information to obtain success.
We support the growth and advancement of all members of the group.
We share and praise accomplishment by valuing and acknowledging each contribution.

Equality and Diversity: We believe in treating everyone with the same rights and welcome different cultural backgrounds to help create a culture that allows them to feel valued and respected. We do not tolerate any forms of discrimination, whether based on race, nationality, gender, belief, ethnicity, and physical disability.

Social Media Expectations

Disclosure of Information: Avoid divulging confidential information about the company and its products. Themes that fall under this category include private information about coworkers, personal communications, monetary disclosures, research and development news, future products, or any other sensitive data.

Be Respectful: Be mindful of how you respond to our followers. Be kind, thoughtful, and courteous when answering users’ questions or concerns, and if it escalates, redirect it by asking their email to resolve the issue privately via offline.

Side note: On our social media platforms, inappropriate comments will be deleted immediately, and those who post negative or false comments continuously will be blocked.

Themes and comments considered inappropriate:

Personal attacks
Spam
Solicitation of any kind
Foul, abusive, obscene, pornographic, or generally offensive language

Transparency: We promise to provide our tartelettes with factual and honest information. If there’s an occurrence in which we made a mistake (because we’re human!), we’ll own up to it and do our best to correct it as soon as possible!

Honor Users Privacy: At Tarte Cosmetics, we respect our customers’ privacy and never sell your information to third-party vendors.

Social Media Crisis Expectations

If there is a social media crisis, the company has set up a guideline for employees to follow:

Create a communication plan. Social media crises are unpredictable, and having a strategy in place allows employees to delegate and respond to any potential problems efficiently. Acting fast is crucial.
Use social listening to identify potential issues. Employees can monitor brand mentions and social sentiment to spot emerging social media issues before a crisis arise.
Stop all schedule posts. It’s best to stop all activity across our social media platforms during a social media crisis until further notice or the issue has settled.
Engage, but don’t quarrel. Social media never stops even after an initial response is issued. When engaging with individuals who continue to post negatively about the company across our social network channels, it’s best to keep it short. Avoid long explanations of what went wrong. Instead, redirect the conversation from the comment sections to a personal communication channel, like private messaging or email.
Be on the same page. Communication can get lost or misinterpret during a crisis. As a prevention method, employees should communicate with one another to be on the same page and what they can or cannot say to the public.
Learn from the experience. After taking care of the social media crisis, take the time to review it with your team. Ask yourself what future measurements can be taken to prevent a similar problem from happening or how to improve your social media guidelines.

You’re Ready

After reading our guidelines, we are optimistic you will uphold our core values and social media ethical standards as an employee of Tarte Cosmetics. We look forward to breaking down beauty boundaries, shattering stereotypes, and redefine natural beauty with you.