Social Media Guidelines

College of Education Social Media Guidelines

1. Social media includes social networking sites such as facebook, myspace, and LinkedIn; Twitter; blog accounts (wordpress, etc.); video sharing sites (YouTube, etc.), and photo sharing sites (Flickr, etc.).
2. The University has published social media guidelines (.pdf), and the following College guidelines build off of these already-established university-wide guidelines. Please familiarize yourself with these and follow them in any social media activities in which you may be posting as a representative of the University, and not as yourself.
3. The College of Education Web site (www.ed.psu.edu/educ) remains the official communications vehicle for the college, and keeping the College Web site timely and up-to-date should be the priority. Units should consider posting announcements on both their respective College of Education Web sites and social media sites to reach a broader audience.
4. Contact the Associate Director of Communications (edrelations@psu.edu) anytime you plan to create a social media account for a unit in the College. He/she will use a dedicated administrative account to create the social media site so that the account does not belong to any one individual in the College. We will then make individuals in your area administrators of the site.
   • a. This allows us to remove individual administrators from the site when they leave the university.
   • b. This also allows us to promote all the social networking resources in the College in one place.
   • c. The only exception to this is YouTube. The College already has an established YouTube site and all videos should be posted there. This is proposed initially because videos take an investment in time and money to produce and therefore are produced infrequently. Other content, on the other hand, are mostly short statements and links, which can be produced very quickly and make up most types of content posted on other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Consolidating videos in one place will show the breadth of the College, and having a larger volume of videos for users to choose from will reflect positively on the College. YouTube makes it very easy to embed and share videos in other web sites, so units will still be able to share their videos in other locations, such as their Web site, facebook page, and twitter feed.
   • d. Existing sites created prior to this guideline implementation can continue to exist. The Associate Director of Communications for the College should be made an administrator for any of these sites.
5. The College’s Associate Director of Communications will review sites periodically to be certain these guidelines are being followed and that sites remain active. If social media sites become inactive or do not follow guidelines established by the College or the University, the College will ask that they be discontinued.
6. Overall, the university discourages smaller units from setting up social media pages that may be little used or seldom updated. With that in mind, units should consider setting up social media sites that represent a larger unit, such as a department or center, as opposed to a smaller unit, such as a program or individual initiative.
   • a. Doing so will make our overall message more easy to manage.
   • b. It will also consolidate work time spent in managing multiple social networking pages in the College
   • c. It will also encourage our faculty, staff, and students to expand their network within the College and engage with others who have similar interests but may not be in their own individual program.
7. Participating in social media is very time-consuming. To do it well, page administrators should be checking the page at least daily if not more often to respond to questions and posts. Administrators should also be posting often to encourage participation and to stay relevant to users. If faculty members are not able to dedicate time to this endeavor, then they should not start a social media presence for their respective unit.
8. Furthermore, Social Media is a very public activity. Administrators posting on these pages do so as communicators representing the College and the University and must abide by the University guidelines for administrators noted in item 2 above. If faculty wish to post items that do not meet with these guidelines, they can participate in social media using their own personal account, posting on Penn State pages as well as other pages as themselves. The University guidelines for communicators noted in item 2 above apply only to faculty when they are posting as an administrator on a Penn State-branded social media site.
9. In addition to the Associate Director of Communications, there should be one faculty member with a full-time academic appointment who is willing to serve as the administrator for the page. Ideally, the role should go to a faculty member who has a long-term relationship with the College, but should at least go to a faculty member with an academic appointment. A faculty member page administrator may receive assistance in performing the administrative responsibilities, but the person actually posting content on the page must be the identified administrator (see 11 below). If a page administrator leaves his/her position, the program or unit should promptly notify the Associate Director of Communications so a new administrator can be identified.
10. Responsibilities of page administrators include:
    • a. Monitor the site on a daily basis to be certain that questions and posts are responded to in a timely manner.
    • b. Post regularly on the site to drive engagement and to make the page a valid and important communication outlet
    • c. Remove inappropriate comments, spam posts, etc.
11. Students can post to the group wall after they become a fan or friend, so students should not be given administrative rights to a page. 
Students can also assist a faculty member page administrator in social media activities by researching materials to be posted on the site. The faculty member page administrator however should formulate all final posts on the site.
12. If students or alumni have already created a page for your program or department, please ask them to stop and send their fans over to the official page. If they refuse to delete the page, please asked them to change the name of the group to something that more accurately reflects their relationship to the program: "Students in the Penn State Adult Ed Program" versus "Penn State Adult Education Program." The owner of such a site must also include a statement saying that this is not the official facebook page of the Penn State unit in question.
13. Please review and follow the University-level guidelines regarding content posted on the site.
    • a. You should have a statement saying we reserve the right to remove improper postings. Administrators should review the site often to make sure postings are appropriate.
    • b. The Associate Director of Communications can help add these statements to your site.
14. When posting photos and other media, please consider the privacy of the individuals in the images. Send an e-mail to the individuals pictured letting them know you plan to post them on facebook. Please also refrain from posting images that may reflect poorly on the University.
15. Please use Penn State and not PSU or The Pennsylvania State University when referring to the University.
16. Advertising on some social media sites is available. Please contact the Associate Director of Communications if you are interested in advertising on facebook or some other social networking site.
17. Units considering creating a social media site should consider the following questions:
    • What are the goals of creating such a site?
    • Who will be the intended audience(s) for this site?
    • What messages do we want to share on this site?
    • Who will write the messages for the site?
    • Who will update the site?
    • How often do you plan to post content to the site?