Social media guidelines

These guidelines will help you adopt the University's visual identity and branding on popular social media platforms. For more information on channels, governance and best practice, please visit our social media guidance pages.

Account images

Follow these recommendations when choosing images for your account profiles:

• have a uniform identity – use the same or similar imagery across all your social channels;
• use images that are consistent with the University brand. Please consult our photography guidelines for more information on the images you could use;
• use images that best represent your department or institution. For example: a University building, teaching, learning and social areas, or photos from inside a laboratory or equivalent research space. 
• use the correct image sizes for each social network (see below table – updated July 2021). Recommended image editing tools include: Adobe Photoshop (requires Creative Cloud licence, available via IT Services, but a free limited version is available online) Canva.com or befunky.com. 

Account names

Follow these recommendations when naming your account profiles: Social media naming profile guidance (260KB)

Profile photos

Follow these recommendations for account profile photo: Social media profile image guidance (290KB)

Cover/header photos

Cover/header photos fill a large area of space so ensure you upload a high-resolution image. Use an image that positively represents your department or subject. It's good practice to use cover photos that are free of text. If you're using an image with text, test the cover on several devices such as desktop, mobile and tablet to ensure all of the text is visible.

It's recommended that you refresh your cover photos at least every three months. The central social media team refresh the University’s Facebook and Twitter headers regularly to reflect campaigns or time periods in the academic term. 

On Facebook Pages, videos can be used as cover headers. The content pays on a loop and is visible to users visiting your Facebook page. The videos last a maximum of 90 seconds and meet the minimum dimension sizes listed in the table below. 

Examples of best practice are:

• Faculty of Humanities Twitter – uses a high-quality exterior image from a teaching building.
• ResLife Facebook page – uses a high-quality image of the ResLife team.

Download cover-sized photos of interior and exterior University buildings (images from Third Light):

• Facebook (7 MB)
• Twitter (22 MB)

Recommended image sizes for social media

For the latest image sizes for the main social networks, visit Hootsuite’s guide: Social Media Image Size Guide

Contacts

For more information or guidance on using social media at The University of Manchester, please email socialmedia@manchester.ac.uk or contact the local representatives listed below.