Q: What is the policy regarding social media sites for departments and programs?

Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

A: Social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog accounts (Wordpress, etc.), video sharing sites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), and photo sharing sites (Flickr, Instagram, etc.) may be created for departments or centers, although the University discourages smaller units such as programs from setting up social media sites that may be little-used or seldom updated.

The University has published social media guidelines, and the following College of Education guidelines build off of these already-established University-wide guidelines. Faculty or staff members creating a social media platform for official use within the college should become familiar with these and follow them in any social media activities in which they may be posting as a representative of the University.

The University guidelines for communicators apply only to those posting as an administrator on a Penn State-branded social media site. Administrators posting on these pages do so as communicators representing the college and the University and must abide by the University guidelines for administrators. Those who wish to post items that do not meet with these guidelines can participate in social media using their own personal accounts.

Contact the director of communications (edrelations@psu.edu) anytime you plan to create a social media account for a unit in the college, so your sites can be added to a list of social media sites. This allows us to promote all the social networking resources in the college in one place.

Facebook sites should add the communications office profile as an administrator of the site. Contact the director of communications (edrelations@psu.edu) for information about the Facebook profile to be added.

The faculty or staff member page administrator should approve all posts on the site. Students (graduate or undergraduate) should not be the primary administrators of any social media sites for the college. While a unit may have an outstanding student in place who is willing and able to keep the platform fresh and current, that person will graduate and then the site may languish. It doesn’t speak well for a program if a prospective student checks out your social media and sees that it hasn’t been updated in six months — so you may do your program more harm than good by setting up social media sites.

Responsibilities of page administrators include:

  • Monitor the site on a daily basis to be certain that questions and posts are responded to in a timely manner.
  • Post regularly on the site to drive engagement and to make the page a valid and important communication outlet.
  • Remove inappropriate comments, spam posts, etc.

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?

The full college social media guidelines are posted at http://ed.psu.edu/internal/social-media/social-media-guidelines. Anyone with questions can email edrelations@psu.edu.

If you have a question for the glad you asked column, send it, along with your name and office phone number, via email to edrelations@psu.edu. For publication purposes, Connections will use the initials of the individuals sending the questions and their department, depending on the nature of the question. Submissions must include a contact name and telephone number so that Connections can verify the source. Requests for anonymity will be honored.

Last Updated February 15, 2017