Global Advice
Do you wish to get started on social media as an organisation or researcher? Here are some steps to help you. List of advice for each social network.
- Get your supervisor’s approval to open an account and inform the Communications Department by email
- Define your objectives
Understanding your objectives will allow you to pick the most appropriate tool (or tools), create relevant content, and choose the best way to reach your audience. The UNIGE social media manager is here to help you: Anne-Laure.Payot(at)unige.ch. - Define a strategy (network, public, language, etc.)
Define what you want to achieve, with whom you want to connect, and what content you want to share. Then start exploring the various social media to choose the tools that will help you achieve your goals. - Choose your communication tool
Do not open accounts on all social media platforms at the same time. Choose a platform that meets your needs and focus on first building your presence. - Identify a coordinator
Decide who will be responsible for updating and monitoring the chosen social media account. - Name your account
Choose a title for your profile. It can be your acronym (FTI, ISE, etc.) Add the UNIGE acronym to your profile name: @Structure_UNIGE. Indicate the location and website of your structure. You can use https://linktr.ee to group several links. - Ask for your logo
Upon request, the UNIGE Communications Department will provide a logo specifically created for your faculty, department, or institute for each social media platform. (A logo is only provided for official structures but not for programmes for example) - Communicate about your online presence
Inform the communications department, employees, students, and the public of the existence of this account. A list of the different institutional accounts is available online. Use traditional information channels, such as emails, newsletters, and your website, to inform your potential audience that you’re on social media. - Subscribe to other institutional accounts
This will provide the institution with greater visibility to visitors, more visits to each account, and potentially more subscriptions to those accounts. - Try it out
Spend time practicing with your new account. Share your profile for several weeks with small groups so you can test it and get constructive feedback. Make sure your account is up and running correctly before connecting to your audience. - Join the community of UNIGE social media managers
Subscribe to the mailing list https://listes.unige.ch/sympa/info/responsables-socialmedia
- Define your objectives
Understanding your objectives will allow you to pick the most appropriate tool (or tools), create relevant content, and choose the best way to reach your audience. - Define a strategy (network, public, language, etc.)
Define what you want to achieve, with whom you want to connect, and what content you want to share. Then start exploring the various social media to choose the tools that will help you achieve your goals. Don't jump on all platforms at once. Pick one that fits what you want to do and focus your time on creating a strong presence on it. - Choose your communication tool
Do not open accounts on all social media platforms at the same time. Choose a platform that meets your needs and focus on first building your presence. - Customize your biography
Add the entity to which you are affiliated. You can indicate several (UNIGE, Faculty, Section, Department, Laboratory, etc.) Example: @Structure_UNIGE. Indicate the location and your possible website. You can use https://linktr.ee to group several links. - Communicate about your online presence
Inform the Communications Department by email and/or faculty's communication officers of the existence of this account. Add a link in your email signature, website, etc. - Subscribe to other institutional accounts
This will provide the institution with greater visibility to visitors, more visits to each account, and potentially more subscriptions to those accounts.
As a member of the UNIGE community, when using social networks, you are expected to exercise best practices and appropriate etiquette on social media, including, but not limited to, the elements contained below in the Legal warning and conditions of use.
Please note that you are responsible for the content of your account and for updating it. Any content published on a social media account linked to a UNIGE department or unit is considered to be an official position and commits that department or unit. Please be careful to differentiate between personal opinions and messages and institutional positions and information.
In this context, members of the academic community must comply with the Code of ethics and professional conduct for the Geneva Institutions of Higher Education ainsi qu'à la Charter for the use of UNIGE social networks.
You must remain courteous and apply good manners at all times, as you would anywhere else. Your account must be used legally and ethically and in keeping with the principles and values of academic freedom.
All posts must comply with the law, be morally upstanding, and not harm the reputation of the University or its members. In particular, there must be no posts of a slanderous, defamatory, insulting, racist, sexist or pornographic nature.
Legal recommendations
Image rights
Ensure you get permission from the people in your photos (if they are recognizable) before sharing them on social media.
Sharing a photo without someone’s consent could breach their privacy.
However, if the individual is in the background or not a main part of the photo, it is not considered a breach of their privacy.
You don’t need to obtain consent if:
• the image is of a public figure or sports person
• the image is of a public event, as people should be aware that there may be photographers present.
Please note: Photos taken in this context should not focus on one individual and should be used to illustrate the event and only for information purposes.
Children's photos:
If you are photographing children, always seek parental consent and specify on which platforms the photos will be distributed.
Please note: Consent is not required if the child is not recognisable or photographed from behind.
Copyright
Be sure to comply with copyright rules when using photos. Ensure that any images or photos you use are not subject to copyright.
Just because you find an image online doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to copyright.
If it is not yours, do not use it. Before publishing someone else's work, check with the owner first. Unless they are published in an Open Access journal, images of published articles are not free of copyright, even if you are the author of the article.
Keep in mind that some photos and images cannot be used for advertising or marketing purposes.
Data protection
Data (especially photos) that you post on social networks belong to those platforms. Spend some time to set the content you want to be public and the content visible only to your relations and subscribers.
The business model of social media companies is based on the exploitation of your data without you receiving any benefit, if not the use of free social media platforms. Therefore, always remember that by taking advantage of a free social media platforms, your data are their product offered to third parties, and you are not their customer.
That means that you will not always find comprehensive customer support, and if the company disappears or is being sold, you might lose control/track of the data you have uploaded so far.
Confidentiality
Your duty of loyalty to UNIGE as an employer also applies to your use of social media. Under no circumstances may confidential or personal information about UNIGE – such as sensitive financial data, unpublished research, or personal data – be communicated via social media.
In particular, do not publish any addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses on social media platforms.
Personal vs. professional boundaries
The boundary between the private and public domains can be quite blurred. A questionable post by an employee may result in a sanction or a statement from the institution.
Mark the difference between the status of an institutional account (lab, department, etc.) and a personal account.
For example, an account "Jon Snow" with a bio that has no reference to their institutional affiliation is a private account. An account "Prof. Snow" with a list of affiliations to UNIGE in the bio is intended as an institutional account.
This differentiation is crucial before votes, for example, when institutions are subject to a reserve duty X days before the vote. In such a case, an institutional account is subject to the same reserve, whereas a private account can still share its opinion.
Take responsibility for everything you publish
The Internet is public and has a long memory. It is virtually impossible to delete an image or message from the web completely, but it is effortless to send a message to millions of other users. Thus, what you post on the Internet can generally be discovered by anyone (in some cases, even when posted for a "private" audience).
Did you post something that just wasn't true? Be the first to respond to your own mistake. If you decide to edit a previous post, make it clear that you have done so.
As a rule of thumb, be 100% sure that you won't regret what you’ve posted, even if a reporter, parent, supervisor, or colleague sees it.
All social media platforms use algorithms to determine how high up in newsfeeds your posts will appear, using ranking signals from profiles and pages.
The aim is to ensure that users get valuable and meaningful content in their newsfeeds.
How does the algorithm work?
The better the content, the more likely the platform is to display it!
The post will first be shown to just 1% of your followers. The algorithm then evaluates users’ reactions to it.
The more positive reactions you get in a short time, the higher up the post will appear in Facebook newsfeeds, and vice versa.
The algorithm takes into account several parameters:
- Information about the viewer: interests, accounts followed, content with which they have recently interacted, etc.
- Information about the post and its quality: Does it get likes, comments, and shares? Do the videos have a minimum viewing time? Or, on the contrary, does my post get negative comments, reports, etc.?
- Information about the author of the post (type of content they usually publish, the people they typically interact with, the performance of their content)
- The relationship between the author and the potential viewer (do they follow each other, have similar interests, subscribe to the same accounts)
- Regularity: if an account publishes content regularly (e.g., once a day), that content is more likely to be featured than content created by an account that publishes less frequently (e.g., once or twice a month).
Even with good posting practices, the audience typically reached by your posts organically will be about 10-20% of your total followers.
How to best work with the algorithm?
- Limit external links
- Publish photos and videos
- Advertising is a solution to get your content shown to a more significant number of people, sometimes even to your subscribers, to whom social networks would not have shown your posts in their news feed.
Are you receiving repeated inappropriate messages, spam, or notifications from a person or account? What actions are available to you?
1. Official "University of Geneva" accounts
@UNIGEnews (French)
The UNIGE, through the @UNIGEnews and @unige_en X (Twitter) accounts, subscribes to other accounts of the institution and to identified members of the UNIGE community. It unsubscribes when they leave the university or no longer have a link with it. The Communication Service manages these accounts.
Along with its official accounts, UNIGE does not follow personal named accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Many accounts are private on Instagram vs. Twitter, where content is mostly public.
Official accounts are intended to provide institutional information so they do not block university community members. Such a practice could constitute an infringement of freedom of expression.
The UNIGE does not block accounts on X (Twitter) or Instagram, except accounts that are contrary to the legal framework, good morals, or automated, as established in the charter for the use of social networks.
UNIGE reserves the right to hide an account if the number of notifications received is too high or the mentions are inappropriate or unrelated to UNIGE's missions.
2. Institutional accounts
Many UNIGE structures (faculties, inter-faculty centers, institutes, etc.) also have an institutional account that they manage themselves.
Accounts that are intended to transmit institutional information are subject to the same rules as official accounts (see above).
Generally speaking, it is recommended that institutional accounts follow the same strategy as official "University of Geneva" accounts.
3. Personal accounts of the UNIGE community
The accounts of the Rector or members of the Rectorate are personal accounts, just like those of the university community members. They are not intended to provide institutional information.
Personal accounts are freely managed and are not part of the official institutional accounts of the UNIGE. You are free to decide whether your account is public or private. The recommendations are, therefore, different from institutional accounts.
However, when choosing to block a person, it is important to consider your position at UNIGE (member of the Rectorate, professor, PAT, student, etc.). The outcome of this action may not have the same impact or visibility.
The problematic person is part of the UNIGE community:
- Blocking -> can be ethically or image-wise detrimental if your account is public and your function is exposed.
The person is NOT part of the UNIGE community but has some impact (alumni, former employee, GE policy, etc.):
- Blocking -> can be ethically or image-wise detrimental if your account is public and your function is exposed.
Implications of blocking
- The blocked person can no longer see the publications of the person blocking them nor interact with them.
- This is a unilateral action (the blocked person cannot do anything about the blocking and is not notified of it).
- The impact of this act (voluntary or not) is essentially symbolic.
- On social networks, blocking someone is considered a fairly significant act of rejection.
- In some cases, blocked people tend to put forward their blocking as a scandal (alleged infringement of freedom of expression) or, in other instances, as a trophy. This is done to prove that they are "disturbing" and that one wants to silence them.
Further info :
Facebook: Ban or block profiles as a page
LinkedIn: Limit access to your personal profile and block a member (not possible as a page)
In the case of a negative comment on social networks or a wider crisis in relation to the institution, it is important to adopt the right reflexes to manage this difficult moment as well as possible.
To help you, download and adapt the guide below with your faculty or department's contact persons, comments and notes:
Guide de l'engagement social et de la modération
Social engagement and moderation guide