Best Practices

The following tips apply to all posts, regardless of channel.

• Purpose: Ensure you have enough relevant content to post regularly, with specific audiences and goals in mind.
• Frequency: Be sure to understand when and how often you should be posting—refer to individual channels for more information.
• Voice and Tone: You’re speaking on behalf of WPI, so make sure your posts are clear and succinct without sounding too institutional.
• Call to Action: Is there a clear action you’d like your followers to take after reading your post?
• Accuracy: Make sure you have all relevant details before posting a status updating or sending a tweet—and if a mistake is made, fix it through a follow-up post, comment, or replacement.
• Responsiveness: Always respond to questions or comments from your followers within 24 hours or less.
• Follow the 60-30-10 “Golden Rule”: That’s 60% posts that engage with shares and retweets, 30% that share content conversation and responses, and 10% that focus on announcements and events.
• Measure Your Success: Decide how you’ll measure your results, and schedule time to reevaluate, make changes, and incorporate what you learn.
• Plan Your Content: It’s important to engage in real time, but don’t forget to create a content calendar to help you repurpose your existing content and schedule monthly campaigns.
• SEO: Make it easy for future followers to find you in a search—be sure your profile includes your organization name, relevant keywords, and a URL to your site or blog.
• Visuals: Humor, memes, etc. can be used to great effectiveness, but can also offend some in your audience. We suggest not using memes and be very tame with attempts at humor.
• Guidelines: Please make decisions on social media posts similarly to how you would post on your university webpages. Refer to university policies (https://www.wpi.edu/about/policies) for more detail.