UCU Kent now has a couple of new social media accounts – we’re on BlueSky and we’ve a new Instagram page too. You may have noticed that the fabulous folk in IT helped us to put our BlueSky feed onto the blog homepage so you don’t even need to visit our page to see what we’ve been posting and reposting.
We previously had an active Twitter account but for a variety of reasons the decision was made to move over to BlueSky. If you haven’t come across it, BlueSky is not owned or controlled by a single company and it uses an open source framework. For the user it looks very similar to the old Twitter but without a huge amount of bots. There is a very large UCU and academic community there – #AcademicSky is full of people from all over the world and they’re a friendly bunch. BlueSky now has well over 30 million users and it continues to grow, but as with any social media platform, it’s best to go where your community goes and where you can have conversations. Unfortunately we found that Twitter wasn’t working for us anymore because of the amount of ‘noise’ from bots, but BlueSky is a friendly place.
Our output on BlueSky tends towards outward facing posts – we share a great deal from other UCU branches, or opportunities and news that might be interesting to our followers. We put a few reminders just for our branch members as well. Like any social media, the point is to be social and interact with others, which means that the occasional cat or dog photo gets shared too.
If you’re on BlueSky then do give us a follow – @ucukent.bsky.social
And here’s a bit more about BlueSky – https://bsky.social/about/faq
We have started our new Instagram account and we’re always looking for new content, so please share photos with us.
https://www.instagram.com/ucu.kent/
We’ve posted our first piece of content there – a reminder to take a break at some point over the summer. We all know that this year we’re continuing to work extremely hard dealing with all the usual summer tasks, but in addition this year we also have EM25 to deal with in preparation for the next academic year. Do make sure you take a break and switch off your emails (and your social media, if you can bear it!).
And as I write this the weather is getting hotter, so drink plenty of water and keep in the shade to stay cool.
