Getting Started

Identify your primary audience (students, alumni, community members, etc.) and think about what kind of content you want to deliver and why. More importantly: What content do they want from you? How can you engage them in a dialogue?

The answer depends on your goals. Each social media site specializes in reaching different audiences in different ways. Knowing these specializations is key in helping you make your decision on which platform(s) you might use.

Here are some guidelines to help guide your decision-making:

Facebook

• What to post: Photos, links, videos, status updates, questions
• Use it to reach... Alumni, students, community members, prospective students
• Quick fact: The most popular platform and still growing. Twenty-two percent of the entire population of the world are on Facebook.

X

• What to post: Links, photos, reposts, points of pride, updates, animated gifs
• Use it to reach... Students, prospective students, media units, companies, brands
• Quick fact: After a notable businessman’s acquisition of X, formerly Twitter, in January 2022, highly active users continued to use the platform but posted less frequently.

LinkedIn

• What to post: Job postings, career information, links, campus updates, industry questions
• Use it to reach... Alumni, upperclassmen, companies and employers, prospective students
• Quick fact: Popular among high income earners and college graduates. Half of online adults with college degrees are on LinkedIn, compared with 27 percent of those who have attended but not graduated from college and just 12 percent of those with high school degrees or less.

Instagram

• What to post: Photos, short videos, stories, livestreams
• Use it to reach... Students, prospective students and young alumni
• Quick fact: Instagram drives the most engagement per post compared to any social network–84 times more than Twitter, 54 times more than Pinterest and 10 times more than Facebook.

Pinterest

• What to post: Photos, fashion, comedy, humor, memes, recipes, apparel
• Use it to reach... Students and alumni, fans
• Quick fact: 45 percent of online women use the site, compared with 17 percent of online men.

Snapchat

• What to post: Immediate photos and short videos
• Use it to reach... Students and prospective students
• Quick Fact: Over 150 million users take advantage of Snapchat stories.

YouTube

• What to post: Videos, Livestreams
• Use it to reach... Students, prospective students, and alumni
• Quick fact: YouTube is the second most popular search engine.

Tumblr

• What to post: Animated GIFs, memes, humor, photos, links
• Use it to reach... Students and prospective students
• Quick fact: 20% of online adults age 18 to 29 use Tumblr.

TikTok

• What to post: Short videos
• Use it to reach... Current students, prospective students, community members
• Quick fact: TikTok is the most downloaded app on the Apple app store with 1.29 billion active users worldwide. Sixty-two percent of TikTok users are aged between 10 and 29.

Source: Pew Research Center, December 2013. For examples of units using each of the above, visit Illinois State's Social Media Directory.

Managing a social media and building an audience is time-consuming. Consider your unit’s goals and resources when weighing whether to create a new account:

• Will you have enough content (news, photos, links, or videos) to post at least 1–2 times a week?
• Can you dedicate 1–2 hours per week to content cultivation, curation, creation, and interaction?
• Could you reach more people by teaming up with a related unit in your college/division? In some cases, it works better for your unit to regularly feed content to a larger unit’s existing social media accounts.
• Does your unit need that new account, requiring an audience to be built from scratch, or can you achieve your goals by leveraging an existing ISU account with a large audience already in place? It may make more sense for your unit to regularly feed content to a larger unit’s existing social media accounts.

Assign one manager to your unit’s social media account(s), as well as one backup. Making social media one person’s responsibility gives that person ownership and avoids too many cooks in the kitchen.

Students can be an incredibly valuable resource. However, it is important to have guidelines on your account’s voice and content guide. Students graduate, and your social media account should be consistent from semester to semester. If a student serves as social media manager, then the student should sign a volunteer agreement through Human Resources.

Who's in charge later?

Use your main departmental email address, such as UniversityMarketing@IllinoisState.edu, as your social media account’s primary contact email, rather than an individual staff member’s. This ensures continuity during staff transitions.

Also, to prevent losing access to a unit’s account if the manager leaves the University, make “State Normal” (UMC’s Facebook profile, SocialNetworks@IllinoisState.edu) an admin of your Page. UMC will not post to your Facebook Page and will only access the Page after consulting with your unit, unless a complaint has been made that required a response.

Be careful

If you use your personal social media account and a social media account for ISU, be sure you are posting on the correct one. Especially when using a smartphone, double-check that you’ve switched over to your personal profile before you post about your vacation plans or dinner

Consolidating accounts

If your unit already has social media accounts but is struggling to build an audience, consider teaming up with a related unit inside your college or division. Together, you may be able to post better content more often, with the added advantage of it being easier for users to find.

Abandoned accounts

A stale or abandoned social media account that represents a campus unit is detrimental to the University’s reputation—more so than not having that account at all.

If you need help recovering or reactivating an abandoned ISU-related account on a social media site, please contact SocialNetworks@IllinoisState.edu. UMC cannot guarantee that an account can be recovered or reactivated.

If your unit’s social media account(s) has not been updated in the past six months, UMC will contact your unit for more information. If an ISU account has not been updated in more than eight months, it will be removed from the University’s Social Media Directory.

When you create a new social media account for your unit, follow these naming conventions:

• Facebook Page name: Unit at Illinois State, e.g., "Department of Technology at Illinois State"
  • You can also customize your Page Address (URL) to make it shorter, such as Facebook.com/ISURedbirds. Go to About, then Edit.
  • Preferred style: /ISUUnitName
• Twitter handle: @ISUUnitName
• Twitter name (displays to users): Unit Name at Illinois State
• Instagram: @ISUUnitName
• Snapchat: ISUUnitName
• Facebook and LinkedIn Groups: Begin name with "Illinois State–"
• Flickr screen name: UnitName at Illinois State
• TikTok: @IllinoisStateUnitName, #ISUUnitName

Choose wisely. Some sites like Facebook limit the number of times you can change your account’s name.

Please note: While "Illinois State" (not ISU) is the preferred way to reference the University in external communications and narrative text, ISU is acceptable in these Web-based naming conventions.

If you create a new account, either for your unit or an alumni affinity group, email SocialNetworks@IllinoisState.edu so it can be added to the Social Media Directory.

Put your unit’s social media strategy on paper, addressing each of these questions. You should craft (or at least discuss) this strategy with your unit’s director, chair, or lead supervisor:

• Who is your manager? Who is your backup?
• What are your primary goals?
• Who are you trying to reach, and why?
• What kind of content will you be posting? Where will that content come from?
• How often do you want to post?
• What will be the name of your social media account?
• How and when will you measure the success of your efforts?

There’s no right or wrong answer for how often your unit’s social media site(s) should be updated. But if you are not able to post new content at least once or twice a week to your account, you may be overextended and should consider consolidating or shutting it down.

Develop a schedule

The best way to keep track of your content is to maintain a social media schedule for your unit—a Word document or Excel spreadsheet that allows you to organize and spread out your content. An example of such a schedule is below:

Date	My Unit's Facebook Page	My Unit's X Account	My Unit's Instagram
Monday	Link to newspaper article about a Unit alum	Link to article about alum	Photo of unit alum in stories, with a link that users can follow to the story
Tuesday	Photo album of Unit event. Link to story.	Photo of event, with link to more photos or info	Photos of the event
Thursday	#ThrowbackThursday: Old picture relevant to your unit	Promote #ThrowbackThursday: Old picture relevant to your unit	#ThrowbackThursday: Old picture relevant to your unit
Friday	Question: What was your favorite unit class?	Promote upcoming unit event.	Short live video with student to promote the event

Meta allows you to schedule posts for Facebook and Instagram to be published at a future date/time. X now requires a paid subscription to schedule posts through X Pro. You can also preschedule posts using third-party applications, such as Hootsuite.

Though scheduling posts/tweets is valuable, leave yourself the flexibility to post in real time, such as from a live event or during an important announcement. Not every post needs to be pre-planned.

Automation between accounts = Bad

Don't automatically send your Facebook posts to your X feed , or vice versa. Treat each social media site independently, so you don't lose opportunities to drive comments or tag other users (X posts are limited to 280 characters, so a Facebook post may get lopped off midway through).  

Share, share, share

One of the best places to find easy, sharable content is on the Facebook page or X feed of another unit. You should "like" other ISU Facebook pages and "follow" other ISU X feeds and check them routinely. By sharing another unit's content, you're keeping your own account updated, and you help promote the other unit.  

When possible, link back to a University website. If you're promoting an event or program, don't feel the need to cram everything into that post. Just share the basics and link to your unit's website.

You're representing ISU!

Consider what could happen if a post becomes widely known and how that may reflect both on the manager and the University. Be cautious of controversial content that may create issues for the University, your department, and you. If you have questions regarding posts, consult your supervisor.

When representing the University on social media, social media managers are encouraged to maintain a professional tone. While it is understood that each unit has its own culture and relationships with on-campus constituents, tone should be carefully considered so as not to alienate prospective students, alumni, and other off-campus constituents who may be removed from the campus culture. Always maintain a friendly, professional voice.

Double-check your posts for typos and grammatical errors before and after they’re made public. Posts coming from the University should never contain such errors. Ask a colleague to set up mobile notifications for your account. That way, they can be another set of eyes on your content. Additionally, consider installing browser plug-ins such as Grammarly.  

TikTok tactics

Here are some best practices for managing your TiKTok account:

Creating an account

Always represent Illinois State in the best way. Be cautious of controversial content that may create issues for the University. Know and follow the rules. Do not post confidential or proprietary information about the University, its students, alumni, faculty, and staff. If possible, use the same profile photo from other social media accounts and include a link to your unit’s official ISU website in your TikTok “bio” section.

Things to know

If you are filming students for a TikTok, it’s important to get their consent. Videos can be 15 seconds to 3-minutes long. Most TikToks are made with and viewed on smartphones, so it is preferrable to shoot footage vertically.

Jump on current trends

Make the most out of viral trends, sounds, hashtags, and challenges by thinking about how to integrate that into your channel. The best part about TikTok is that trends stay trendy for a few weeks, so you have time to get creative and think of content that is relevant to your channel.

Boost your account

Your videos are likely to be discovered by others in the surrounding areas if you post regularly. It’s recommended to post once or twice a week for consistency on your channel.

• Cross promote on other channels: Take advantage of existing social media accounts and cross promote your TiKTok videos on those channels
• Utilize hashtags: #fyp #foryou #IllinoisStateUniversity (and anything else relevant.)
• Engage with your audience. Comment on other users’ accounts to gain some visibility.

There are easy ways to measure your success on social media. Some social media sites offer free onboard analytics tools that display data about your audience’s size and engagement level.

• Meta Business Suite: This easy-to-use tool, available to all Facebook Page and Instagram managers, provides recent information about followers, the number of people each post reaches, and how many of those people interact with your post in some way, such as liking it, sharing it, commenting on it, or clicking it.
• X: The analytics page can be found in the pulldown menu that opens when you click on your X logo in the upper right-hand corner of the page. From here, you can see what posts have performed the best over time, how your audience is growing, and how engaged that audience is with your content.
• LinkedIn: Analytics is accessible to page administrators in the top menu on your “company” page. The easy-to-use tool offers separate suites of metrics looking at your page visitors, updates, and followers.  

You can quickly see what types of posts are most popular and adjust your strategy based upon that information. For example, if you learn from Facebook Insights that your audience loves historic photos of your alumni from the 1970s, you should consider posting more historic photos. If you find students aren’t responding much to your 9 a.m. Facebook posts, consider posting at 7 p.m. instead.

In most cases, these tools allow you to export data files that you can analyze in Excel or elsewhere.

There are also more sophisticated social media analytics and monitoring tools available for a cost. Start with the free tools before considering these products.