style guide: Writing for social

How to write for LinkedIn and Bluesky as ELIXIR-UK. The bar is “is this on-brand and useful?”, not “is this important enough?”.

What’s worth posting

If it’s UK-relevant and on-brand, post it. The full list:

• A member’s paper, award, grant, new role, talk, panel
• A new ELIXIR-UK Service or a major update to one – named with its host institution
• A UK-relevant Hub news story (re-share with a one-line UK angle)
• Calls, opportunities, vacancies (Zapier already posts these from the newsletter – see below)
• Events the Node is running, attending or contributing to
• Community moments – All Hands, club calls, working-group outputs

What we don’t post:

• Corporate Node statements – amplify a named member instead
• Posts in someone else’s voice that they wouldn’t say themselves
• Anything that implies we own a service we only endorse
• “Big news!” / “fantastic!” / “Read it now!” – see Do & don’t

How to write the post

The voice rules in Voice and Do & don’t apply. The short version:

• Specific over warm. Name the person, the institution, the result.
• Endorse, don’t own. “FAIRsharing, hosted at the University of Oxford” – not “our FAIRsharing”.
• Lead with the substance. Not with ELIXIR-UK.
• One link per post. The post is a hook; the link is the destination.
• Tag the people involved. If they’re on the platform, @ them. Members like being amplified.

If you’re writing a longer post (LinkedIn carousels, threads on Bluesky), follow the webstory inverted pyramid – most important thing first, taper down.

Images and links

How posts carry imagery depends on the platform’s link-handling.

• Bluesky uses the OpenGraph image automatically – the platform pulls the banner from the linked page’s metadata. Nothing extra to do.
• LinkedIn currently collapses banners and OpenGraph cards in-feed, so the OpenGraph image isn’t doing the work it does on Bluesky. Two workarounds, both standard practice for us:
  1. Image + link in the post body. Attach a banner image manually and paste the link in the text. The image is the visual hook; the link is the destination. Use the news banner template for this.
  2. Link in the first comment. LinkedIn deprioritises external links in the post body itself, so posting the link as the first comment can get more reach. The post text carries the hook, the image carries the visual, the comment carries the link.

See imagery, logo and colour for visual rules. Banner templates live on Templates.

Cadence

There is no posting schedule. Post when there’s something worth saying.

Patterns we lean on:

• Job postings auto-post. Zapier takes new UK vacancies from the ELIXIR Hub vacancies page and posts them to Slack and LinkedIn automatically. Don’t manually re-share – let Zapier do its job.
• Events get a beat each. Pre-announcement, day-of, recap. Three posts, not ten.

How posts reach Hub channels

The Hub re-shares Node content when it’s tagged appropriately:

• Tag @elixir-europe.org (Bluesky) and the ELIXIR LinkedIn account when the post is relevant to the wider consortium.
• For inclusion in the ELIXIR Weekly Brief, send a one-line summary and a link to info@elixir-europe.org.
• The Hub retains editorial control over what gets re-shared. Don’t expect every UK post to be amplified – the bar is consortium-wide relevance.

For ELIXIR-UK members posting in a personal capacity

Members posting about ELIXIR-UK from their own accounts are amplifying us – we welcome that.

• Tag us. @elixir-uk on LinkedIn and Bluesky so we can re-share.
• Use the boilerplate if you need a sentence about ELIXIR-UK in a longer post.
• Name your institution alongside the Node. “I work on [Service] as part of ELIXIR-UK, hosted at [University]” reads better than “ELIXIR-UK has…”
• Don’t speak for the Node. Personal voice, personal opinion – not Node policy. That’s fine, and often better than a corporate post.
• Use the Hub hashtags when relevant – #ELIXIR and campaign-specific tags.

When in doubt, post. We’d rather amplify too much than too little.

Related pages