Philosophy Department Social Media
A philosophy professor is interested in developing a social media account for his department, and could use some help.
He writes that his department has decided it needs to improve its communication with and visibility to students, the rest of the university, and the surrounding community, and that a greater social media presence is one of several steps they’re planning on taking to do this. (He notes that his department did at one point have a Facebook account, but that it has long been neglected.)
“None of [the department faculty] does a lot on social media,” he says, so “we have some questions, and we were hoping philosophy professors and students elsewhere could help answer them.”
Here are the questions:
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- What social media platforms would it be best for the department to have account on, if we were limiting ourselves to just two accounts?
- Ideally, should we post the same material on all platforms, or present the material differently depending on the platform, or post about different kinds of things on different platforms?
- What kind of things does your department tend to post on social media?
- Who runs your department’s social media? Who can post on it? One faculty member? A committee? Students? Who should run it?
- What are some good examples of philosophy departments using social media well?
Worth considering, as well, are any downsides and difficulties with a department making use of social media.
Readers, please answer whichever questions you can. Thank you!
My department is in the same boat of starting our social media presence. We are going to start IG, FB and X accounts (even if we are not active on all three initially). I was skeptical that FB would be useful for student outreach but a colleague brought up that that the parents of majors (and prospective students) are also an audience you reach this way.
As a neo-graduated student, my humble opinion is that I strongly recommend to create a Telegram account and a Facebook account. The first could be used to keep up with every appointment scheduled by your Department: very easily, the account manager sends on the Telegram channel of the Department a message every time there’s some event you want to make known, and possibly some very important news to share. Facebook can be useful to post photos or posters of events or lessons, to speak about some incoming seminar that can interest a larger public than the relatively narrow group of habitual followers (those who can follow Telegram channel, for example), to offer maybe also some contents (reels, videos, even live recordings) that could attract more Facebook users, even if usually not fond of philosophy. Other social platforms can also be useful to keep in touch with public but I think that those ones are more than enough!
If you want to reach current students, Instagram and TikTok are the platforms you should be using. Very few college-aged students today have a Facebook account.
I would recommend using two: Instagram for student and administrator engagement and then mirroring that to Facebook for alumni or others who might be interested. The mirroring is very easy to do on this using the “Meta Business Suite” (it’s called something like that).
In terms of sustainability and long-term usage, I think mirror is the way to go. Trying to customize content per platform is too much work.
My department publishes faculty publication announcements, promotions/tenure, events that interest students, dept talks, general interest sharing of news media stories related to philosophy, etc. Lots of different stuff. Also alumni news.
A committee of faculty (usually 1 or two people total) run the accounts with some backup people.
Regarding Twitter/X, I don’t think it’s too heavily prescriptive to ask philosophy departments to shun a platform owned by a Neo-Nazi billionaire supervillain who is actively amplifying the voices of his Neo-Nazi comrades.
My impression is that much of academia has migrated to BlueSky. I have about ten times as many followers there as I do on twitter.
In my (American zoomer) view, the optimal use of social media for a philosophy department would be as a hub for promoting its activities and community to people. The best platform for this would be Instagram. Post announcements of events (with good graphic design!) to the story, and to the feed post photos from events, descriptions of exciting courses, clips from faculty interviews, headshots or clips from faculty/student/alumni profiles, etc. Any videos should be posted in full on youtube and linked in the description.
Successful student outreach on this model is students forwarding content to other students who then look at the profile, see both the community and what student success in the department looks like, and so go on to become more involved. You’ll want to encourage students to forward announcements of events or courses to friends and feature student profiles or other content that they’ll naturally want to share.
I would avoid TikTok unless your faculty do tons of video interviews or are interested in regularly preparing public-facing video content (planetmoney is a good example of translating academic content to shortform video). You would also need a volunteer video editor, ideally with VFX skills. I think it would be better to focus on instagram, and mirror any video content to tiktok and any general content to facebook if you like.
I think our philosophy department has a very good social media presence, though I only follow the facebook page myself. Christine (who runs the show) is awesome at it. (We also have nicely designed posters for our talks thanks to her.
https://www.facebook.com/NotreDamePhilosophy
From a US academic perspective: Bluesky is incredibly active among scholars and effective at sharing scholarly content, contributes to great AltMetrics, etc. This seems like a no-brainer platform to prioritize if trying to reach other academics. It also avoids the more acute ethical pitfalls of platforms like Twitter/X and the Meta suite of products (I am actually surprised by how many comments suggest using Facebook and Insta, but this must be my Bluesky echochamber).
As someone who follows a lot of department/center accounts, the effective ones do a good job of sharing out news/new publications/events from their students/faculty (and maybe alums too).
The departments/centers I am part of typically have a grad student in a role with a stipend to manage public communications (maybe as part of other services they provide to the department/center, maybe on top of other traditional grad fellow roles) and one lead faculty member involved in helping to steer content.
My suggestion would be to have some developed norms as a group about what kinds of content will go on the official department page and about liking/resharing content from others – so there is shared agreement about the nature of the account but only one or two key users of the account. This would streamline workflow and accountability.