Social Media Social outlets

Facebook
Facebook is effective for connecting groups with common backgrounds or interests, such as alumni groups. To keep your community engaged, keep your pages active through wall posts, photos and multimedia.

Setting up your account:

Profile image: Use your organization’s logo or an iconic image that represents your group. The MIT logo is reserved for institutional pages.
Category: Most MIT groups should select the higher-education category.
Pages versus groups: Most MIT groups choose to have a page, but if you want to build a small, closed community you may want to create a group. Both can be promoted through Facebook ads. Below is a summary of the differences:

Page Public to the world Recommended for building an external-facing presence When someone becomes a fan, it is posted on their wall and is visible to friends Indexed by search engines Can exceed Facebook’s 5,000-friend cap Engagement metrics available

Group Can restrict to group members only Better for more personal interactions (only groups under 5,000 can send email blasts) Good for small units who want a closed community or to organize around a cause

Engaging your community:

• Make use of tabs (info, events, photos). Fill out the info tab completely and include links to your website and other social media. Use the events tab to promote events or classes.
• Drive traffic back to your page by tagging all photos with your group name.
• “Like” all MIT Facebook pages.

For more, see Facebook’s best practices for educational pages.

Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging tool that enables short, frequent updates through 140-character posts (“tweets”) and retweets.

Setting up your account:

Profile images: Use your organization’s logo or a photo that represents your group. Twitter provides default themes and some flexibility in page design, including the ability to add a custom background. Communication Production Services can help you create a custom page.
Bio: Include a description of your organization and a link to your website.
Hashtags: Preface a word with the pound sign (#) to “tag” your post for easy searching by topic. Hashtags can be especially useful when promoting a specific event or series of events, such as MIT150 (add #MIT150 to your post). The MIT News Office often publishes hashtags for events.

Engaging your community:

• Use a service such as bit.ly to shorten your URLs and track activity.
• Tweet on topic and with consistency, but do not tweet for the sake of tweeting.
• Give credit by using “RT” to signal a retweet or use the RT button.
• Follow all official MIT accounts and relevant accounts outside MIT. As with any social media, it is important to think about whom you follow.
• Display your Twitter feed on your website.
• Post images to your feed using TwitPic.
  
  

MIT TechTV and YouTube
MIT TechTV offers free video hosting and allows any MIT group to create its own channel. MIT TechTV also manages the MIT YouTube channel. When you submit your video to TechTV, you can request that it also be submitted to MIT’s YouTube channel.

Uploading and promoting your video:

• Once you have uploaded your video to MIT TechTV, you can embed it on your home page. You can allow others to embed your video by selecting that option on upload.
• Tag your videos so they are easily searchable. Categories are listed at http://techtv.mit.edu/videos or on the Upload page.
• When embedding a video from MIT TechTV, check the Mobile Support HTML5 box if you want your video to be viewable on your mobile device.
• Post segments of your video on your home page. Short clips or trailers with a specific focus can link to a longer video.
• Submit your video to the MIT News Office. If they choose to feature your content, they may edit your video to a 60- to 90-second clip, which can link to the full video.

For more information, visit MIT TechTV.