Social Media Guidelines

To publish content on your social media has turned into a science of its own. The algorithms change all the time, new formats for pictures and videos are introduced ever so often and the big question is always: What do put online.

First think about what you want to achieve: Do you want to get attention, do you want to provoke, to gather votes, to share your opinion or raise an issue?

Here are a few tips you should have in mind when posting on either Facebook, Instagram or Twitter:

• Share several times a day but space out your posts every few hours, either manually or with timing.
• Google and Facebook are unfortunately calling the shots regarding what is acceptable to post online, which sometimes – and frankly quite often – can seem more like censorship than practical and sensible guidelines. Keep this in mind when you post your images. For example, when a delegate posted his photos from the Stockholm Pride parade he was banned for 48 ours because some of the women in the parade did not wear tops.
• Respond to comments as quickly as you can, and very important, not only those you think is nice. Nice or not, be professional when you respond to the comments.
• Mr Gay Europe has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to hate comments and discrimination on social media. We encourage our delegates to report to the webpage in question and it worst cases to the police if they experience this. We would also like to be informed if this happens.
• Entertain and inform your audience first, sell and ask for favours (like «Vote for me!») secondly.
• Use first person plural (us, we) when talking about MGE and the competition and first person singular (me, I) when expressing opinions or feelings.
• If you are on Twitter don’t automatically direct message people that follow you, even if it is a celebrity.
• Don’t hijack another company’s or people’s hashtag.
• Don’t buy followers – this includes votes!
• Don’t stuff your tweets with keywords.
• If you are posting on Facebook, don’t Like your own post.
• Don’t post or tag photos of fans, customers, or other people without permission.
• Don’t tag people or pages that aren’t relevant to your post.
• Don’t ask for Likes, Comments, or Shares.
• Videos seems to get more traffic than photos, and post with several photos seems to get more traffic then post with only one image.
• Best image sizes for Facebook are according to buffer.com horizontal (landscape) images: 1,200 x 628 pixels, vertical (portrait) images: 1,080 x 1,350 pixels, links with an image: 1,200 x 628 pixels, Facebook Stories:  1,080 x 1,920 pixels. Facebook recommended image size for sharing images and sharing links with an image is 1,200 x 628 pixels. Facebook still requires an aspect ratio between 9:16 to 16:9.
• When you are on Instagram, don’t ask people to follow you or use hashtags like #tagsforlikes – it’s unprofessional.
• Don’t overgram. No one likes their feed filled up with one user even if you are fabulous!
• Use hashtags appropriately. The golden number of hashtags is for the moment 11.
• You can upload photos with different formats, right now the best sizes for Instagram are square: 1080 x 1080 px, landscape/horizontal: 1080 x 566 px and portrait/vertical: 1080 x 1350.
• Instagram Reels or Story images and videos should be portrait/vertical: 1080 x 1920 px.

Most of the technical information in this text is gathered from the webpage buffer.com, please visit them if you want to learn more and update yourself regarding posting on SoMe.