Social Media Guidelines and Best Practices
This guide provides guidelines and best practices for managing Brown University-affiliated social media accounts.
To ensure the protection of Brown’s reputation across all platforms, Brown social media managers and content contributors should promote responsible communication, safeguard confidential information and help maintain a strong and respectful online presence for Brown University.
- Use the Brown name and logo appropriately. Do not modify the Brown logo. Do not use the Brown name to endorse a business, product, cause, political party or candidate.
- Follow Brown’s Visual Identity Policy and Brown’s Visual Identity Standards for best practices and proper use. Contact the University Communications to create a social media avatar for your unit.
- Maintain professionalism and respect others. Avoid content that misrepresents or reflects poorly on the University.
- Maintain confidentiality. Do not share confidential or proprietary information about Brown students, employees or alumni.
- Adhere to laws and policies of the University, federal government and NCAA, including FERPA and HIPAA.
- Adhere to copyright and fair use laws. Do not post content without proper permissions.
- Secure your accounts. Review Brown’s IT guide to protecting social media accounts to avoid phishing and unauthorized access.
- Create Brown University-affiliated social media accounts with a shared departmental brown.edu email address to ensure continuity of administrative access.
- Define your social media goals, audience and key messages.
- Choose social platforms wisely—it’s better to manage one account well than many poorly.
- Create a content calendar to stay organized and consistent.
- Review content for grammatical and spelling mistakes. If you make an error, correct it quickly.
- Monitor activity and comments regularly.
- Foster two-way communication. Engage with your audience via likes and comments as appropriate.
- Do not censor disagreement or posts with which you personally disagree. Avoid criticizing other people and institutions.
- Hide (but do not delete) libelous, offensive or spam comments.
- Use moderation tools to remove spam or offensive content.
- Consider posting community guidelines to set expectations.
- Use analytics tools in-platform or elsewhere to track engagement performance.
- Analyze engagement to refine your content strategy and understand your audience.
- Link back to Brown in post copy. When possible, connect to Brown’s homepage or other Brown news channels instead of an outside source.
- Email Social-Media@brown.edu to list your account in Brown’s official directory of social media accounts and join the Social Media Managers Group e-list.
- If your unit plans to start a new social channel, consider contacting University Communications to coordinate with other Brown social media sites and content, discuss best practices, and for general assistance.