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Social Media

Learn how to start a department or organizational social media account, find tutorials for content creation and explore best practices for student involvement.

Getting Started

The task of creating a social media account from scratch can feel daunting. Starting with the goals of the account can be a helpful jumping point. 

  • Who is your audience? All William & Mary students, or a specific group?
  • Will the account serve as information dissemination? Are you trying to actively engage students or just share resources?

Next, narrowing down a theme will help maintain both consistency within your own brand and relevancy on a student's feed. 

  • Besides W&M green and gold, what are two other colors from the brand kit you want to highlight?
  • Are you picturing photos, graphics, or short-form content?
  • What will graphics look like? Retro, art deco, minimalist or abstract? How can you tie in the W&M Brand Kit's textures?

It may serve you to browse Canva templates and determining what styles best emulate the goals. Creating your own design focus within the W&M brand kit will help not only guide you, but any student employees who may help generate the content. See the Branding Basics guide to learn how to create your own kit and use Canva to its fullest extent.

Along the same lines as a theme, the account's username, profile picture, and biography help visually identify you and link you to W&M. 

  • Try to incorporate "wm" as a prefix or suffix (i.e. wm_admission or wmalumni).
  • When naming the account, include a reference to the university with "W&M" or "William & Mary."
  • The profile photo should be easily recognizable and unique to your department or organization. W&M has created a template to help you if the creativity is not flowing. 
  • In the bio, mention the account's "official" connection to the university, as well as an informational description. Include a link to your website, TribeLink or W&M Events Calendar.

Finally, creating a posting schedule is entirely reliant on what is realistic for you and your team.

  • If your goal is information dissemination and resource sharing, posting biweekly might be all you can manage, but student employees could boost that up to once or twice a week.
  • Posting sporadically could work for a goal of event sharing. 
  • A general post once a month highlighting the upcoming events is an easy way to balance goals and workload. 

Tag Your Teammates!

Understanding the current landscape of W&M social media accounts can be helpful when co-hosting an event, sharing a department's post or simply connecting photography back to the university.

  • Use the Social Media Directory to find record of all associated accounts.
  • Don't make up your own hashtags in connection to W&M! Check out this list of pre-existing tags.
    • Use camel case for hashtags, like #TribeIsEverywhere.
  • Reach a larger audience and create community by collaborating on your Instagram post! A collaborative post appears on all (up to 5) participating accounts. 
    • Create your post, then tap Tag People.
    • Select Invite Collaborator, then tape Share.
    • Invitees must accept the post. Once accepted, the post appears on both accounts.

Accessibility

W&M Web & Design requires all images on university social media channels to have an image description or alt text. 

layout table

Instagram

Instagram supports custom alt text for posts, which allows screen readers to read an auditory description of the posted image. 

Adding Alt Text to New Posts:

  1. Create a new post and select your image(s).
  2. On the caption screen, tap Advanced settings (or more options).
  3. Select Accessibility, then Write Alt Text.
  4. Edit or replace Instagram’s auto-generated alt text for best accuracy.
  5. Tap Done, then share your post.

Adding Alt Text to Existing Posts:

  1. Open the post, then tap the three dots in the top-right corner.
  2. Choose Edit, then Edit Alt Text.
  3. Update the description and save.

If your account posts reels, utilize Instagram's auto-captions:

  1. Upload or record your Reel.
  2. On the editing screen, tap More options.
  3. Scroll to Accessibility and enable Captions, reading carefully for review. 
  4. Post your Reel.

Add captions to video stories, too:

  1. Go to the sticker tray, then select Captions.
  2. Watch the video with the auto-generated text. To adjust wording, tap the words to edit the text.

Facebook

Adding Alt Text to New Posts:
  1. Before posting, select Advanced Settings. 
  2. Select Write Alt Text.
  3. Write your image description.

YouTube

Embedded YouTube videos on the W&M website must have captions. You can use YouTube’s auto-generate function, but you must manually review them as they are only about 95% accurate and often incorrectly display proper nouns, such as the university’s or a speaker’s name. You can also enlist the help of a captioning service to caption your videos for you.

EXPLORE MORE ACCESSIBILITY TIPS

Student Employees

Students can be a great help when it comes to creating content for social media accounts, but keeping track of their work is a must. You might choose to implement a tracking chart for monitoring the posting cadence, who manages which posts and which channel is engaged. If you do not want students posting directly on the main page, incorporate a system such as Meta Business Suite, which allows you to approve all posts before they go live. 

Remind your student employees that they represent the university with their creations. Content should be appropriate, free of grammar and spelling mistakes and in accordance with the brand kit and W&M values.