Social Media Guidelines

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DVC Social Media Guidelines

DVC's marketing team does not recommend creating social media accounts for individual departments or programs. Social media is a great way to engage and inform students about your department and/or program, but building a following and maintaining social accounts is a lot of work. You cannot expect immediate results and you could be spending many hours creating content that very few people are reading. If you are thinking about creating social media accounts for your department and/or program, please contact Brandy Howard or Keith Parsons in advance of doing so.

If you have an event, program or story that you'd like to see featured on the college's primary social media accounts, please submit a marketing request form with the details.

These guidelines apply to the use of the Diablo Valley College name, likeness, logo, and information about and representation of the college on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Social media platforms will certainly expand or change over time, but the intent of these guidelines applies to all current and future platforms.

These guidelines apply to public accounts. If you administer, or plan to administer, a private social media account for a class, club, or affinity group that cannot be viewed by the general public, these guidelines do not apply. Of course, appropriate use of the DVC logo is always required.

Department & programs social media accounts

It is important to have a solid plan in place, including content strategy and staffing that isn't soley reliant on student workers, for a department or program social media account. A social media site with outdated content or infrequent activity can cause your department or program more harm than good so, once started, the site must be adequately maintained. Also, an outdated site can negatively impact the status of the whole college in search engine results.

All social media accounts for college departments or programs are required to complete the Social Media Account Registration form.

The college has official social media presence on multiple platforms, and each has a robust following. You should have a very good reason to duplicate these efforts with your own account.

Before starting any new social media site, you should consider the following:

Is there a compelling need/purpose for creating the site?
Who is the audience?
Who will maintain the site?
Does the creator (or designee) have adequate time to monitor the page and keep the content current?
What will the content be, where will it come from, and is there enough?
Will students/others be allowed to contribute content?
Is there someone lined up to take over the page if or when the creator can no longer maintain the site?
How will you evaluate the success of this site and how will you know if your efforts were worthwhile?

Content development:
When posting content to your site, remember:

Consider your audience.
The style and tone should be appropriate for that audience.
Your content should be clear, direct and student oriented.
Your page content should be current and frequently updated -- the more often new content is added, the more users will find the page.
A page without a single post during a college term (including summer) will be considered abandoned.
Your page needs to be accessible and follow all ADA requirements.
Remember – grammar and spelling matter!

A note about social media and accessibility:
As a representative of the college, you are responsible to ensure that your social media site ADA compliant. This isn’t always easy. Social platforms are continuously changing, and these changes often impact ADA compliance regulations. There are many resources available on the web to stay up to date. The administrator of the social media account will be responsible for the compliance of their site.

Social Media Accessibility Toolkit

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Social media content

Content created by the DVC account administrators/contributors on registered affiliate social media sites must relate directly to DVC business, programs, services, or related student interests.

Student club accounts must be monitored by the club advisors to ensure that these guidelines are followed. Similarly, a site representing a DVC department or program must have oversight by a department dean or manager who takes ultimate responsibility for the content.

All DVC social media sites represent our institution of higher learning -- grammar, spelling and punctuation matter. Frequent errors do not reflect well on the college in the eyes of current or prospective students and/or their parents and members of the community.

DVC welcomes and encourages lively discussion and a variety of opinions on social media; however, if offensive or unlawful content is posted on one of our official sites, DVC reserves the right to require that the content be removed by an authorized administrator of that site (or by the Communications office if an authorized administrator cannot be reached.)

Further, DVC reserves the right to remove any comments of posts.

Content posted by site administrators or authorized contributors cannot promote or link to sites promoting individual opinions, political causes or commercial endeavors. Any registered affiliate social media account must adhere to existing District policies governing employee and student behavior, in addition to any policy required by the social media platform. Users must also comply with all federal copyright regulations.

Any department, group or program that has a social media account using the DVC name or logo but is not registered with the marketing department or in any other way does not follow these guidelines will be required to remove the site. If the site creator cannot be identified or located, the manager or dean responsible for the program or department will be responsible to petition the platform to remove the site.

The college cannot be responsible for content created by students or employees on unofficial social media sites but has the authority and responsibility to remove these unauthorized accounts.

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Register your social media accounts

The marketing department has oversight over all DVC’s public branded social media pages. Registration with the department is required for all public social media account (new or existing) that are using the college name or logo.

Registration includes providing administrative access to the DVC marketing department so that they can remove content or remove the account if the primary administrator cannot be reached. This does not mean that the marketing team will provide ongoing oversight over your account and will only take any necessary action if it is brought to our attention.

You are required to register your account if:

you are an employee or student representing a group on campus that seeks to create a public social media site affiliated with an official DVC group, department, club, program, etc.,
you use or plan to use the college’s name (DVC or Diablo Valley College), likeness, or logo on any social media platform.

Registration of all college social media accounts is required so that we can contact the responsible administrator if any issues arise. Registration will help to avoid abandoned accounts that are difficult to shut down because site administrators are no longer at the college.

To register:

Read and comply with this Social Media Guidelines document
Fill our the DVC Social Media Registration form

Do not create your own version of the college logo or copy it from an unauthorized source. Please download the college's official logos and use only those provided.

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Social media administrators community of practice

Social media administrators from across campus meet monthly to share ideas and network. The goal of this group is to bring those who are managing department social media channels together in collaboration so that we can collectively step up the college’s social media game. As a community, we will work together to determine exactly what that means, but here are a few things that the marketing team has in mind:

Skill building through trainings, resources, and best practice sharing
Collegewide social campaigns
Crisis communications requirements and practices
Registration of channels across the college to ensure brand alignment and continuity of management in the event of staff turnover

If you are managing social media accounts for your department and/or program, please join our social media administrators community of practice group by contacting Keith Parsons.