UF Health’s social media team is here to help you launch, grow and maintain a successful social media presence for your unit. While social media is a great way to communicate with our patients, students and communities, it requires a good deal of time, planning and resources to provide engaging content your audiences want to see. We’re here to help you plan and evaluate that work.
The process to plan, review, and approve an account can take several months. If you are wanting to create a social media channel, we recommend strongly that you begin that process at least eight weeks prior to your intended start date.
How do I request an account?
Consultation and Strategy Planning
- The social media team will contact you to set up an initial meeting to discuss your goals and expectations for posting on social media. This is an opportunity for us to provide our experience and feedback in building an effective strategy. We’ll provide you a guidebook with tips for making the most of your social media platform, as well as best practices and guidelines for social media accounts from UF and UF Health.
- Based on our consultation, we’ll ask you to complete a social media strategy plan for your channel, including a sample editorial calendar of 3-4 weeks’ worth of content that reflects the best practices and guidelines we’ve provided.
Strategy Plan Review
Your strategy plan and editorial calendar will be reviewed by a team of UF Health Communications professionals:
- First, a social media committee made up of experienced social media administrators and communicators.
- Next, by the UF Health Web Services Director and UF Health Communications Marketing AVP
- Lastly, the UF Health Chief Communications Officer
The UF Health social team will serve as a liaison between the reviewers and the proposed account managers in case they have any questions or concerns.
Once these reviews have been completed, the UF Health social media team will contact you and ask for you to sign a social media account agreement, that reiterates the goals and expectations of the account based on the social media strategy plan.
What happens after I’ve been approved?
There are a number of things to consider in starting a new account – what and when you will be posting; how that content meets the goals set with your communications representative and mission; how active you will be on the account to answer questions, and what resources will be devoted to building and maintaining the channel. Use our strategy planning document to help answer those questions (we’ll also ask you to send us a copy of that document in the next step).
- UF Health Communications conducts periodic audits of our social media channels to see that they are following our recommended best practices and standards for creating accessible and engaging content. If we see ways we can improve your content or build a larger audience by leveraging our brand and other social media assets, we’ll reach out to discuss.
- Once per year, we’ll review the goals set forth in your content strategy document to see if the account is reaching those milestones. If it is not, UF Health Communications will reach out to see how we can support the channel or if we should discuss alternate ways to meet the unit’s needs and audiences.
- The UF Health social team routinely sends out case studies and recommendations to our social media administrators and alerts them about ongoing academic health center campaigns they can contribute to or amplify.
- We also hold semiannual training sessions and brown bag lunches for social media administrators to get together and share knowledge about what has worked or not worked for their platforms. We encourage you all to take part so we can work collaboratively across UF Health.