Making use of social media
Who's using social media?
Links to official University pages on Twitter, YouTube, etc can be found on our social media page.
Help us keep up-to-date by contacting web-editor@bristol.ac.uk with your new social media account, to be added to our listings.
If you are thinking of using social media services, eg Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress etc, please contact us in the PRO web team to review guidelines for your social media accounts and discuss how your social media strategy can fit into the University's overall social media strategy.
Social media guidelines
For general guidance, please refer to the EDINA Social Media Guidelines (353Kb, PDF). For specific guidelines, please refer to the sections below.
Linking to your social media channel
The sections below contain instructions for using our standard social media logos to link to your channel.
Guidelines
Although we do not have specific Facebook guidelines, you can refer to the EDINA Social Media Guidelines (353Kb, PDF).
Adding the Facebook logo to your page
Please insert the following code into the html/source of the webpage, remembering to insert the name of your channel (embolded text):
<div id="leftnav-facebook">
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/nameofyourchannel" >
<img src="/cmsimages/social-media-buttons/facebook-button.png" alt="Follow the School of XYZ on Facebook" height="34" width="170" /></a>
</div>
Guidelines
There is a useful overview of LinkedIn, together with instructions for setting up profiles and managing privacy settings on ESET's Threat Blog, LinkedIn Privacy: An Easy How-to Guide to Protecting Yourself.
University logo for use on Twitter
If your Twitter account relates to a University department (as opposed to an individual's account), please use the following University logo:
University logo for use with Twitter (PNG, 12.8kB)
Naming convention
Several University Twitter accounts use 'uob' or 'UoB' in their handle. While this makes sense to current staff and students, who are used to seeing this abbreviation being used to represent the University, it is not so recognisable to the public, especially as other universities such as University of Birmingham and University of Bath also use 'uob' as an informal abbreviation.
To make your Twitter account more obviously associated with the University of Bristol, use our preferred naming convention:
@UoBris[name]
If you have already set up a Twitter account, but would like to amend it to fit the naming convention above, visit Twitter's guide to changing your username.
Guidelines
The London School of Economics Impact of Social Sciences blog team have developed a useful Twitter guide (PDF, 1.2MB) for use in university research, teaching and impact activities.
Legal guidelines for social media are evolving quickly. Read this recent article, Twitter and the law: ten legal risks in tweeting to or from the UK, to help you avoid making any legal errors in your tweets.
Adding the Twitter logo to your page
Please insert the following code into the html/source of the webpage, remembering to insert the name of your channel (embolded text):
<div id="leftnav-twitter">
<a href="http://twitter.com/nameofyourchannel" >
<img src="/cmsimages/social-media-buttons/twitter-button.png" alt="Select to reach our Twitter channel" height="34" width="170" /></a>
</div>
YouTube
Guidelines
We do not have specific YouTube guidelines but we do provide video guidance.
Adding the YouTube logo to your page
Please insert the following code into the html/source of the webpage, remembering to insert the name of your channel (embolded text):
<div id="leftnav-youtube">
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/nameofyourchannel" >
<img src="/cmsimages/social-media-buttons/youtube-button.png" alt="Select to visit our YouTube channel" height="34" width="170" /></a>
</div>
Blogs
A blog is an online diary with comments and opinions on any subject and can include links to other websites. Most new blog pages are automatically stamped with the date and time of their creation, which reinforces the perception of blogs as journals.
At the moment there is no supported blog service.
Wikis
A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are a good tool for collaborative project work. Find out more about wikis.
Our wiki service is managed by IT Services. For more information, visit the IT Services wiki service page. You can also see who is using wikis on the Confluence wiki dashboard.
Note: some of the documents on this page are in PDF format. In order to view a PDF you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader