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Communications and Marketing

Guiding Principles

Our social profiles are important to members of the Carolina Family. They are curated to maximize viewability and trigger authentic engagement.

Digital Accessibility

All the content you create needs to be accessible. Review the guidelines and tutorials on the Digital Accessibility website to create inclusive content.

 

There's a firehose of potential content in a university as large and vast as ours. We limit posts from official, university-level accounts — including @UofSC on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as the University of South Carolina on LinkedIn — to a manageable volume and share only stories that will engage our audiences. Here are key principles we follow for posting — or not posting — content to university-level accounts. Feel free to apply the same strategies to manage your university-affiliated account.

University-level accounts are:

 

Engaging

The primary goal of social media is to engage your audience. We want to make sure the people who are following us are not only listening to what we’re saying, but also joining in on the conversation. Because engagement is a goal of our program, the threshold for what we post to university-level accounts must be high.

 

Enthusiastic

Think of the social media channels as the university's lead cheerleaders. Our job is to help amplify the great things happening every day on our campuses (and beyond!) that help tell our story as South Carolina’s flagship university.

 

Socially Savvy

The way stories are told in newspapers or on websites doesn't necessarily fit social media. We keep our eyes open for stories that will perform well on social media. If you think you’ve got something that fits that bill for university-level social media, you can contact us to submit a story idea for consideration.

Social media best practice

Building Brand Advocates

When we tweet, post or snap in ways that engage people, we're investing in our audience. Online interactions have the power to turn a passive fan into an enthusiastic advocate.

 

University-level accounts are not:

 

Event Promoters

The volume of university-affiliated events greatly exceeds best practices for posting on social media. That's why university-level social media accounts only promote signature events, with just a few exceptions based on popular opinion among students.

 

Fundraisers

University-level accounts cannot be used to solicit monetary donations from our followers.

 

News Accounts

The University of South Carolina makes the news — a lot. While some news makes sense to post to main university channels, posting all of our news mentions would bombard our followers and make them less likely to tune into our messaging when we really need them to.


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