If you wish to create a social media account on behalf of the University, please fill in this form, which will be reviewed by a member of the Social Media Leadership Team (SMLT). Before requesting a new account:

• detail your objectives, what you wish to achieve and why;
• consider if social media the right channel to reach your target audience(s). Just because your target audience (e.g. current students) might use social media sites regularly, it doesn't necessarily mean they will follow and interact with a new account;
• consider the amount of time and resource required to manage a social media account. We would recommend putting aside around six to seven hours a week to create content, manage enquiries and complete other tasks;
• check the directory or do a search on social media to ensure that the account doesn't already exist, or being served by an existing account.

Our University Social Media House Rules outline what we think of as unacceptable behaviour on social media. Using these as a guide, you are welcome to block and report the user sending abusive messages, and would encourage individual members who are being targeting to do so in addition. If the user sending the abusive messages is a member of staff or student, please refer to the below guidance and procedures:

• student social media policy;
• staff social media policy.

We have a few suggestions for staff who want to encourage more engagement on social media, outlined below. For tips on promoting your research, head to our promoting your research page.

• consider paid promotion. Simply boosting your post on Facebook by £10-50 can reach a much wider audience. Similarly, Twitter promotion can be cost-effective if you target the right audience;
• create new and engaging content, such as video and GIFs;
• ask internal and external partners to share your content via their own channels;
• if hosting a public event, create a Facebook event page and encourage others to tag their friends and family in the post;
• A/B test with different/shorter/more engaging copy and imagery.

This can entirely depend on what students you are interested in reaching. Are they from a particular academic School or subject area? Are they a certain age group? Do they have similar hobbies? Consider these factors and what types of content students might find useful. .

Generally, Instagram and TikTok tend to be where students are engaging more regularly, particularly with peers. 60% of TikTok’s audience and 30% of Instagram’s audience is aged 16-24 (Hootsuite 2021). That doesn’t necessarily mean they want University accounts to ‘invade’ that space with a promotion or engagement, so choose your channels wisely.

This can vary per channel.

• for Facebook and LinkedIn, we’d suggest very rarely using hashtags, on LinkedIn a maximum of one per post;
• for Twitter, only use up to three hashtags and ensure that these are hashtags around broad campaigns or events. University-specific hashtags receive very low attention. Also ensure you have researched the hashtag beforehand to ensure it does not promote inappropriate content;
• for TikTok, we suggest using a number of keywords as hashtags;
• for Instagram, we suggest up to five hashtags. The key to Instagram hashtags is to do your research and search the hashtags beforehand to ensure that this is the kind of content you want to be associated with and where your audience are. This can be done by simply searching a few hashtags in the search bar.

Please ensure that your hashtags capitalise the first letter of each word and don’t include emoji’s, as to not confuse screen reading software. For example, #WednesdayWisdom not #wednesdaywisdom. See our guidance to accessible social media content here.

Contact the University social media team with details about your campaign or event and we’ll get back to you

Social media Faculty leads are on-hand to support with paid promotion. You can find their contact details at the bottom of this page. 

Watch Justin Wilson’s paid social media masterclass here.

Ensure your content is respectful, accurate and relevant to your account and audience. For more guidance, visit this page.

Free tools such as Canva or BeFunky as useful tools. We would suggest also looking a subscription to the Adobe Creative Suite (available via IT Services) to create graphics via Illustrator and PhotoShop.

For larger campaigns, you can put a request in with the University’s design team here.

Windows Movie Maker and iMovie are Desktop applications that allow you to edit video for free. Adobe Creative Suite also offers access to professional software Premiere Pro and AfterEffects.

For larger campaigns or events you can put a request in with the Media Services team.

We would encourage all videos to be subtitled. You can subtitle a video by uploading it to YouTube, downloading the .srt file and either using this in the video edit, or when uploading directly to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. You can find more information on how to do that here.

Filming on a smart phone with a tripod is acceptable for creating video content for social media. A webcam of HD quality is also acceptable.

See our guidance on how to optimise your videos on YouTube.