Social Media Strategies & More
Objectives
- Connect with students, student organizations, University departments, and surrounding community through online conversations.
- Promote events/areas to demonstrate the diverse number of groups and events in your department throughout the year.
- Develop a strong relationship with followers through creative, relevant posts.
- Utilize images, mentions (tags), and hashtags to better tell your department's story.
Policies
- Be respectful.
- Strive for accuracy.
- Remember your audience.
- Keep personal views separate from your department's posts.
- Do not share confidential or private information.
- Respect copyrighted materials.
- Use proper grammar.
- Be appropriate – updates represent your department and Northwestern University.
- Correct mistakes.
Best Practices
- Be strategic with social media.
- Review post before pushing send. (spelling, grammar, links, etc.)
- Use appropriate language, features, and number of characters.
- Strive to use less than 100 characters per tweet (including links).
- Don’t put links to Facebook from Twitter or vice versa.
- Don’t use #hashtags in Facebook.
- Properly tag accounts/handles.
Make it a Conversation
- Monitor mentions of your department and its areas.
- Retweet mentions when appropriate.
- Thank users for retweets.
- Ask for retweets, yes ask.
- Answer questions/address complaints immediately.
Images, Links & Hashtags
- Use images to drive the highest engagement.
- Include links (With URL shorteners if necessary)
- Ensure links work.
- Don’t use more than two hashtags.
- Facebook: Only include image if it relates to post. / Edit web page title and body text to relate to the update.
Maintain
- Keep users organized in proper lists. (Twitter)
- Monitor mentions and other conversations about your department and its areas.
- Monitor Northwestern’s departments, groups, faculty/staff, and students.
Live-Tweeting Resources