Web Communications / Social Media

Web Communications

UNC Charlotte’s main website contains a wealth of valuable information for prospective students, current students, faculty and staff, alumni, and members of the community. As with many large websites, content was developed organically by diverse groups from across the campus. While the content that they generated was relevant to their immediate audience, oftentimes authors did not think about how individual pages and sections fit into the greater web structure. In addition, a variety of web publishing software was being employed and there was not a central repository to house this important information. Furthermore, the University lacked branding guidelines, which made the website seem disjointed as the user navigated from page to page.

In 2008, UNC Charlotte’s Web Content Management System (CMS) initiative was begun. Under the supervision of the Web Advisory Council (WAC), the purpose of the project is to implement a CMS to support the creation, management, delivery and sharing of web content across colleges and departments at the University while also promoting compliance with standards for branding, accessibility, and communications. The CMS provides the tools and resources to enable even non-experts to publish and maintain web content.

The goals of this project are as follows:

  • Support organizational consistency in branding, messaging, and identity
  • Facilitate the creation and management of standards-compliant websites
  • Meet legal requirements for web content accessibility
  • Implement technical and graphic design continuity throughout the University’s websites
  • Decrease the need for specialized technical skills, staff, and resources for web publishing needs
  • Provide a centralized, dynamic, flexible, and high-quality campus web infrastructure

Social Media

UNC Charlotte’s social media team manages the University’s Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, and YouTube accounts; a new Tumblr site will be added in Fall 2014.

The University posts a wide variety of content every day on each platform and shares information spanning academics, athletics, global reach, research, and campus culture. Recognizing that social media is an effective tool that can benefit different types of audiences, our staff use social media to engage the community and become more involved with the University.

In addition, the team created and manages the MediaMine database, which contains links to approxiamtely 750 social media websites managed by colleges, departments, business units, and student groups and organizations on campus. It also includes a page on Social Media Best Practices, which are the guiding principles the team uses to manage University-level social media sites. If you’d like to learn more about these tools but don’t know where to start, consider taking some time to review the content on the reading list.

Watch this video to learn more about social media usage here at UNC Charlotte.