UC Santa Cruz’s social media guidelines are designed to empower divisions, departments, programs, and clubs to establish and manage their own social media networks. These guidelines apply to all official UCSC social media accounts. Social media is a vital resource for positively promoting and communicating news, events, and other information about your organization or area of interest to the campus community.
Managing and creating a UC Santa Cruz profile
When you are setting up a social media profile for your department, division, area, club, or activity, please let us know about it so we can support you. Review our social media best practices to help you make the most of your profile.
A few quick tips:
- Decide who your audience is and who you are trying to reach. Then pick the platforms you want to use on social media:
- TikTok/Reels: Gen Z and students; Use trends, behind-the-scenes, student takeovers.
- Instagram Feed/Stories: Campus highlights, campus events.
- Bluesky: Academic news, research updates—3–5×/week.
- Facebook/LinkedIn: Parents, alumni, research community
- If you need help determining what platforms you should use contact socialmedia@ucsc.edu
- Post on a consistent basis. If you are only posting once a month, your profile will not get any engagement and will have no chance to grow. Choose the days during the week that you will be posting on your platforms and stick to that schedule.
Maintain brand consistency
- Handles: Include “UCSC” or “UC Santa Cruz” clearly and consistently across platforms. Stick to one handle for your entity. For example, if you are creating an account for the history department, name your Facebook page “UCSCHistory” and your Bluesky profile “UCSCHistory.” Be as consistent as possible.
- Main profile image: Use a distinctive graphuic as your profile photo that will be visually recognizable to your audience and will set your profile apart from other UC Santa Cruz profiles.
- Visuals: Use UCSC logo, colors, and maintain visibility across channels. Reference current image size guides (e.g., Sprout Social, platform specs).
- Accessibility:
- Add accurate alt-text to images.
- Use captions for videos (auto‑captioning should be manually checked)
Content and tone
- Be accurate and transparent: fact-check and correct mistakes promptly.
- Be professional and respectful: use appropriate tone, spelling, grammar. Avoid slang overuse.
- Respectfulness and inclusion: refrain from slurs or hateful language; refer to UCSC Principles of Community for guidance on campus values.
- No endorsements: avoid promoting commercial partners or political content.
Engage and moderate responsibly
- Encourage dialogue: those who comment on posts from UC Santa Cruz social media accounts are free to discuss and disagree with others regarding topics relevant to the purpose of the social media platform. Users should not use ethnic and racial slurs, hateful speech, personal attacks, abusive language, nudity, or pornography.
- Comment policies: UC Santa Cruz reserves the right to block or remove the content of any post that may violate state or federal law, and University of California and UC Santa Cruz policies. Comments posted to UC Santa Cruz social media channels do not represent the opinions of UC Santa Cruz.
- Platform policies: UC Santa Cruz abides by Instagram, Bluesky, X, Google, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, LinkedIn and TikTok’s Terms and Conditions and asks you to do the same when participating in these communities.
- Escalate emergencies: if comments indicate safety risks, immediately contact UC Santa Cruz Police.
Accessibility and legal compliance
- Copyright & privacy: always obtain permission for use of content; credit the source.
- No confidential disclosures: never post internal or sensitive information.
Quality control and analytics
- Review before publishing: check spelling, grammar, accessibility; get peer review for high-stakes posts.
- Track & adapt: monitor metrics monthly—followers, reach, engagement, clicks & conversions (e.g., via UTM links, Bitly). Refine strategy based on outcome.
Visual and video
- Graphics: Optimize for platform-specific dimensions
- Video best practices: aim for under 60 seconds. Grab attention in first 8–10 seconds; add captions; tailor aspect ratios (e.g., 9:16 for Stories).
- Mobile first: design for mobile consumption, prioritize Story/Reel/Short formats.
Access and training
- Educate your team: request a Social Media 101 session by emailing socialmedia@ucsc.edu; stay informed on policy changes and platform updates
Access resources: leverage the UCSC Social Media Best Practices guide, brand, and image size cheat sheets.