Social media is a huge part of how we stay connected to our #RetrieverNation community. Within this site, you’ll find tips for getting started, best practices, accessibility suggestions, downloadable graphics, and more. Before you do anything, we’d suggest you start by looking at our community guidelines below so you have a better idea of how we like to interact with our audiences and we hope you’ll do the same. If you have any questions about social media or this site, please don’t hesitate to reach out to social@umbc.edu.

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UMBC Community Guidelines for Social Media

Social media is all about connecting with our community. We love it when Retrievers comment on UMBC’s social media posts and we appreciate your feedback. We also love that we have a community that can engage in civil discourse, respect differences of opinion, and share ideas thoughtfully.

To make sure we keep UMBC an inclusive and welcoming institution, we ask you to keep a few things in mind when interacting with our university social media accounts.

• Keep the conversation relevant. We are an institution of higher education, not a place to sell or promote goods or an ad space.
• Engage with the topic at hand. If we determine comments are spam or if they appear to be off-topic material generated by “social bots,” we may remove them.
• It’s pretty hard to Google how to fix your computer if your computer isn’t working. Let’s avoid that entirely and agree not to share links that contain viruses or other content that could damage the operation of other people’s computers. And only share original content, not content that violates copyright. Posts containing links with viruses or which violate copyright will be removed.
• Let’s keep each other safe. It’s not acceptable to post threats that indicate an intent to harm another person or to encourage others to harm someone. This includes anything that incites violence.
• Much like you wouldn’t want someone sharing your personal information, we ask that you respect the privacy of others. Don’t share any other individual’s personal information including, but not limited to, an email address, phone number, or mailing address.
• We want our social media to be a space for everyone. For that reason, keep it clean and don’t make us remove comments because of profanity or obscene language. We know you can get your point across without it.

Although UMBC isn’t responsible for comments that come from visitors to our sites, if comments violate existing statutes—such as violations of intellectual property rights and imminent threats—they may be removed.

 

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