Best Practices & Advice

Before you begin

Each platform has its own unique language and ways to be effective. To have a successful social media account, a department must keep a robust social media presence and engage with followers.

Before applying for a social media account, consider if you need your own account or if content can be featured on other established official channels. If so, contact the social media manager for those accounts to work out a plan to incorporate your content. If that’s not the case, begin to think about your goals for the social account.

Creating content: start with your website

Shareable content often starts with your website. Any good social media page links its audience back to where they can find additional information. Your pages, stories, and events on the Beloit College website can be good sources for social media posts.

The first step in figuring out what content to create is by listening to your community:

Who is your audience?
What useful information are they looking for?
What interesting or exciting content do you have to share with them?
What do you want them to know?

When it comes to sharing content with social media, also keep “shareability” in mind:

Is this something you could share on social media? If you find it interesting, chances are your followers will too.
Make the headlines of your pages and stories catchy and memorable.
Use a visual element. Adding a photo or video will increase the visibility of your posts.
Create goals for your account using the SMART theory.

Stories in particular are great pieces of content to share on social media:

Real people doing interesting and exciting things is particularly sharable.
Stories don’t have to be long. Just 2-3 paragraphs is enough.
The story’s summary is not unlike a social post: a single sentence that gets the whole idea of the story across.

For the basics of adding stories to the website, refer to the help pages or contact web staff.

A website that is consistently updated with good, interesting content means a consistent set of content for your social media. Likewise, having a body of website content to point to can help in your social media channel proposal.

Tailor your content for each channel

Social media channels have personalities. Yes, that may seem strange, but it’s true. The 280 characters you write on Twitter, may not have the same impact on Instagram.

Simply put, don’t post everything everywhere, especially not on the same day.

In general, while you do want to share your content everywhere you can. You must tailor your content to the channel you’re posting on. For instance:

Facebook: Tag pages related to the post and add photos for shareability.
Twitter: Use concise language when posting to ensure your message makes sense and will fit the 280 character limit.

Do not link your social media accounts directly

You shouldn’t ask your Twitter followers to click to view an Instagram post or vice versa. Followers should be able to easily access content for each channel. If you need a place to direct users on multiple platforms, add the content to your website and link to it. Again, be aware of the different audiences’ posts are going to and how things are treated.

Accessibility

We want all users to access our content. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it’s also a legal requirement to make information accessible.

Image Descriptions

All images on College social media accounts should include an image description or alt-text. When writing an image description think of the following:

Prioritize important information on the image.
Include any info a person would need in order to participate in the program or activity.
Avoid assuming gender, race, or other identities unless it’s relevant to the post.
Use general terms and avoid jargon when possible.
When using infographics, avoid redundancy and only include in the alt-text information that is not already covered in the post copy.
Avoid flattened text or text included in images.

Emojis

While Emojis are always fun, they can be a problem for screen readers or text-to-speech programs, these devices will read the description for that icon, which can vary. Be selective about using emojis in your posts and prioritize written content. You can double-check the descriptions for any emoji using emojipedia.org.

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