Social media guidelines

Ideal character use: 138 – 150

Audience: prospective and current students (17-21 year olds)

Tone: Informal, colloquial, authentic, casual

Types of post: reels, stories, posts, collab, carousel, live videos

How to write Instagram descriptions

1. Get to the point immediately and write the most important points at the beginning. Essentially, frontload the post.

2. Optimise for SEO – think of keywords that your users will be using when searching your insta topic. Include these keywords when frontloading. Eg: your post is about budgeting for students. Keywords can include:

• Student budgeting
• Budgeting tips
• How to budget
• Cost-of-living

3. Include a call-to-action. Remember, these start with a verb!

4. Use a maximum of four hashtags #.

Example of Instagram description

Want some student budgeting tips to help you get to pay day? As the cost of living continues to rise, learning how to budget can make life so much easier!

Share your budgeting tips in the comments!

#studentbudgeting #budgetingtips #costofliving #studentlife

Maximum characters: 2200 – but keep descriptions as short as possible!

Audience: prospective and current students (17-21 year olds)

Tone: Informal, colloquial, casual, relatable

Types of post: videos, live videos, images

How to write Tik Tok descriptions

1. Keep your description short. If the content isn’t educational or instructional, then try to stick to 1-2 sentences.

2. Use a maximum of five hashtags #

3. Include relevant keywords for SEO – Tik Tok is increasingly being used as a search engine amongst younger people, so include semantically relevant keywords that reflects your post topic.

4. Ensure the tone of the description matches the tone of the video.

Example of Tik Tok description for a video about Pancake Day

It’s time to make the perfect pancakes for Pancake Day 🥞 Food Science and Nutrition course lecturer Joe explains how!

#LearnOnTikTok #pancakeday #CCCU #canterburychristchurchuniversity

Ideal word length: 200

Audience: prospective students

Tone: more formal, approachable and friendly, informative

Types of post: live videos, long-form video content

How to write YouTube descriptions

1. Frontload the description – include most important information at the beginning. Be specific and include relevant keywords.

2. Include relevant keywords for SEO – find relevant keywords that semantically relate to the video topic. Include these throughout the description where you can, particularly at the beginning.

3. Be aware of the complexity of sentences – remember, content must be accessible to all reading levels. Keep sentences simple.

4. Include a call to action.

5. Include timestamps and links at bottom.

Ideal word length: up to 80 words

Audience: prospective and current students, alumni, parents

Tone: More formal, approachable, friendly, informative

Types of post: posts, pictures, videos, stories, carousels, Facebook live

How to write Facebook descriptions

1. Be clear and focus on making meaningful interactions.

2. Frontload the description – include most important information at the beginning. Be specific and include relevant keywords.

3. Include relevant keywords for SEO – find relevant keywords that semantically relate to the post topic. Include these throughout the description where you can, particularly at the beginning.

4. Be aware of the complexity of sentences – remember, content must be accessible to all reading levels. Keep sentences simple.

Read more about the Facebook algorithm here.

Ideal character length: 240-259 (40-60 words)

Audience: current students, prospective students, businesses, local media.

Tone: Dependent on the subject matter. Broadly informal and friendly/light-hearted unless promoting corporate news and research.

Ideal hashtag number: 1-2 and tag relevant CCCU accounts to make sharing easier.

Example of a less formal, student-orientated tweet

Wishing a happy and blessed Ramadan to all observing the holy month #RamadanMubarak CCCU is delighted to be hosting two Iftars for their community during Ramadan - https://ow.ly/Jb7s50QKHfI

Example of a more formal, corporate tweet

In this week's #ExpertComment Dr Jake Monk-Kydd writes about the #PanamaCanal and the severe effects of drought and climate change which is causing major disruption for shipping companies

@cccuccbs

Ideal word length: 75-100 words or 200-300 words, depending on context. Read more in-depth here.

Audience: Businesses, local media, staff, other HE establishments, parties interested in research

Tone: Formal and explanatory, confident and promoting our expertise, community, or impact.

Some tips for LinkedIn

• When promoting news and expert comment, give a brief summary of what the article contains and prompt people to read more.
• One option is to focus on creating content that solves your target audience's needs - here, you can share personal experiences that relate to the issue and you overcame them, creating relatable content.
• Repurpose old posts that displayed good engagement. 
• Focus on good, readable content: find the hook, be relatable, don't include unnecessary words. 
• As always, keep your audience in mind.

Types of post: Long-form text, corporate video, university news, research and research news, themes of local or regional interest.

Before you consider using social media in a professional context you should familiarise yourself with how the University is using social media. Look at the University’s accounts that are already established.

We're always on the lookout for new and exciting content to share to our wide audience – so get in touch to discuss how we can collaborate!

Read and adhere to the University's Staff Social Media Policy, which covers key information about usage and data protection.

Understand the social landscape

Survey the landscape. Listen to the current conversations on Facebook.

• What are the thought leaders in your field saying and sharing?
• Are there people, or organisations, with a similar profile to ours that are active on social media

Monitor and evaluate what they do. Get comfortable with the terms used and the conventions of interacting in these spaces to ensure you can use them naturally and effectively.

You don’t need to be a particular age or type of person to excel in using social media. You simply need to enjoy communicating and understand how social media fits in the context of your professional role. It is important to remember that you are part of an organisation. What works on personal accounts might not work or be appropriate on accounts that represent the University.

Think about purpose and objectives

Social media should never be undertaken as an end in itself. Your social media activity should be linked to the business objectives of your team or department, as you would with any other marketing or communication plan. Having 500 Twitter followers is not an objective, but building an audience base to market to on Twitter may well be an important tactic in the bigger picture of student recruitment. Social media will rarely be the end goal, but it can form an important part of the journey that you are measuring.

Consider the overarching communication and marketing objectives of your department or your team. How can you use social media as part of the range of tools available to help you meet your existing objectives?

A note on paid-for advertising through social media

Only the University’s main social media accounts managed by the Department of Marketing and Communications can run paid advertising through social media.

Know your audience!

Before setting up an account, we recommend that you check that your intended target audience wants to engage with you through social media. Get some real evidence to prove this! Talk to your target audience, conduct a survey, or meet with them to understand their needs.

• Who is your target audience?
• Which social channels do they use?
• Who do you intend to promote your account to, and who would you like to engage with?

Understanding the audience and what will appeal to them – and when – is also incredibly important. For prospective students, understanding where they are in the application cycle should lead messaging:

• For example, highlighting the UCAS deadline in January
• Pushing accommodation when it opens in March
• Posting information about Clearing when it starts in July.

Carefully consider administration and resource

Running an effective social media presence requires considerable time and hard work. The commitment shouldn’t be underestimated. You must discuss this within your team and with your line manager and the department of Marketing and Communications. With adequate planning and support from colleagues, you could utilise an established social media platform at the University and work collaboratively with other teams. If you set up an account you can ensure you will integrate social media communications into your workload effectively and efficiently.

Working out exactly how much resource you require to maintain a social media account will become easier once you have clearly identified your objectives.

If you’d like to create your own social media platform, please fill out a proposal form and send it to:

• Faculty/school requests:
  • Submit your form to the Social Media Manager and your Faculty Marketing Manager.

• Professional service departments and other requests:
  • Submit your form to your Department Manager, Social Media Manager and Student Communications Officer.

Social media platforms are increasingly being used as search engines amongst our main target audience - prospective UG students. Using relevant keywords that semantically relate to your post will make it easier for users to find your content.

Remember: you must choose keywords that:

• Link to your post topics
• Users are using.

Rules for each platform are mentioned above. As a rule of thumb, here are some overarching rules for SEO:

• Include keywords at the beginning of your description – this is called frontloading.
• Use 2-3 keywords and repeat where possible.
• DO NOT keyword stuff – if you include keywords in a description that don’t quite fit or make sense, this will cause your content not to rank at all.
• Include keywords in hashtags #
• Add alt-text and subtitles to make content accessible.
• Be aware of trends - users will be paying attention to trends and using keywords from these trends. These will usually be informal/colloquial. Keep up to date with trends so your content can be found.

For more information, read Hootsuite’s Social Guide.

• When adding links into content, always provide a clear and concise description of where the link is taking a user.
• When adding images, always provide an alt description which says what the image shows.
• When creating video content for social media, ensure captions have been added which display what is being said. These can be created during production or through the social platforms themselves.
• For more information on web content accessibility, refer to the writing for web guide.

In all our comms, and especially with social media, we need to be mindful of the themes relating to Vision 2030. The five overarching themes have been distilled down to certain things that we are, and that we do:

• Genuine
• Compassionate
• Aware 
• Confident
• Courageous. 

Another element of Vision 2030 is the narrative pyramid. We should ensure that any content we put out relates to this. Please also see the mini Tone of Voice guidelines  for more information on our house style and brand messaging. 

Ensure that we are referenced as either 'Canterbury Christ Church University' or 'CCCU'.

Ensure that all logos and cover photos adhere to the new logo design. If you need help with this, please contact your Faculty Social Media Manager or the Social Media Manager.