Best Practices

Social media is one of the most effective and accessible tools for higher education institutions to connect with target audiences, amplify their impact and elevate brand visibility in an evolving communications landscape. By strategically leveraging social media platforms, institutions can engage prospective and current students, foster meaningful connections with alumni and stakeholders, communicate critical research, address concerns and ultimately drive enrollment, enhance reputation and achieve institutional success.

Rice University is committed to streamlining and strengthening its online presence, broadening outreach and optimizing content to ensure accessibility and build advocacy.

Strategy and Best Practice

1. Authenticity and Human-Centered Content: Audiences increasingly value transparency and genuine connections, making it essential to prioritize storytelling, exclusive content and user-generated material to build trust and foster engagement.
2. Platform-Specific Strategies: With platforms evolving rapidly, content must be continuously tailored to align with tone, trends and timely topics that will maximize exposure by capitalizing on algorithms and audience behaviors.
3. Community Engagement and Responsiveness: Building active, two-way relationships with audiences through timely responses, interactive content and community-driven initiatives fosters brand advocacy and long-term loyalty.

Rice Recommendations

1. Quality over Quantity: Online platforms and user behavior are continuously evolving. It is important to ensure that your digital footprint is optimized to meet your content creation capacity and available resources. In 2025, seek opportunities to streamline and strengthen your online offerings, pause before creating new accounts and contact central communications to discuss ideas for collaboration.
2. Elevate and Engage: Social media allows you to share the uniqueness, excellence and impact of Rice with the world. Always evaluate your content to ensure it aligns with strategic goals and priorities, institutional key messages and initiatives, events and exciting opportunities. In sharing online, we seek to encourage others to share our content further, serving as brand advocates, ambassadors and allies. 
3. Serve and Protect: As Rice does not own or operate the social media platforms on which we ask individuals to engage, we must aim to ensure privacy and mitigate risk. Account administrators should be posting daily, monitoring hourly, engaging regularly and sharing concerns with central communications as soon as possible when necessary.
4. Timely v. Trendy: As a higher education institution, our goal is not to be popular online — it is to highlight our impact in ways that are relevant to our community and society more broadly. Avoid the appeal of chasing online trends in favor of identifying opportunities to elevate Rice resources in alignment with popular online conversations, cultural observances or community interests.
5. Adding Value: The internet is a noisy space, filled with ample content and an array of information (some true and some untrue). Social media accounts that carry the Rice University logo are seen as speaking on behalf of the institution, our leadership, our values and our community. Content published on affiliate university channels must always aim to be inclusive, dignified, high quality and accessible.

Writing for Online Environments

1. Get to the point: Always start with the “Five Ws” — who, what, when, where, why. Every character counts.
2. Stay on brand: We want all online users to know that the content you share is related to Rice. Always use the logo, brand palette and familiar Rice language when you post.
3. Speak the language: Online spaces not only value brevity, they demand cultural and community relevance. Each platform is home to a unique set of expectations with which you must align your content. Not doing so will impact your performance.
4. Call to Action: Ensure each post provides a link to a Rice resource, article or event. Give readers a reason to stop the scroll and engage with your post.

Questions?

The Rice University Office of Public Affairs is available to assist you with questions and concerns related to social media, marketing, branding, visual content creation and online communities. Please email: pubaffrs@rice.edu.