Social Media Policy

Missouri S&T recognizes that social media is a way to raise awareness of our university, tell our story and build relationships.  

While there can be immediate benefits, social media platforms that span our university must be aligned with our social media brand standards, including brand identity and voice. We are all responsible for upholding the stellar reputation of our university by ensuring social content is professional, inclusive, reflective of our mission and brand, and compliant with policies established by the University of Missouri System.

policy resources

Disclaimers

Many social media users include a prominent disclaimer saying who they work for, but that they're not speaking officially. This is good practice and is encouraged, but don’t count on it to avoid trouble - it may not have much legal effect. All electronic content supercedes print documents, such as PDF's, on the mst.edu domain.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. View a copy of this license. Send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Portions of this document were created with the assistance of http://policytool.net.

Prepared by Missouri S&T marketing and communications
marketing@mst.edu
Revised February 5, 2019

Social media guidelines

Social Media Guidelines

Social media is often the first experience a user will have with your service; complete the following steps to ensure your audience is engaged and informed.

Know your audience. Ensure the content you are posting is relevant to your user.

Know your goals. Every time you post, ask yourself what you want your audience to do with the information you posted. Do you want them to sign up for an event? Go to your main website to see course offerings? Inform them of new faculty research?

Determine which social media outlet you should use, depending on the user persona (demographics), to increase audience engagement. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have very different audiences. If you maintain more than one social media site, make sure to tailor your message in each medium.

Ensure consistency of tone. Pages can have multiple administrators; make sure your posts have the same tone. KMNR and the College of Engineering pages are not going to have the same tone because the audiences are different.

Post relevant and timely content. Users want to utilize your page as a source of information. Avoid posting dated content.

Post often, but not too often. A good rule of thumb is to post every other day unless there is time-sensitive news that needs to be included. Users do not want to be inundated with information, but at the same time, too little information makes the page look dated or abandoned.

Optimize content by adding visuals. Posts with visuals receive significantly higher engagement than text-only posts.

Ensure your social media pages are in-brand with Missouri S&T. For example, it is our job as social media administrators to display the name of our university correctly: Missouri S&T or S&T on second reference. When social media pages do not use the correct brand terminology, it weakens the brand. A page titled “Science and Technology Research” is not easily identifiable as being part of the greater S&T brand. Users will also have a harder time finding and following your page if you do not follow established naming conventions.

Know when to use #hashtags. Hashtags are for Twitter and Instagram; they have no functional purpose on Facebook unless you want to specifically want to redirect to your Twitter and Instagram accounts. Social media admins who use hashtags incorrectly on Facebook can seem out of touch with social media trends.

Grammar counts. Run all your posts through spellcheck and, if possible, have another set of eyes review your content prior to posting.

 

Visit the university social media directory.