Social Media Guide for Chapters

We love to raise our voices about the RLadies+ community!

This section outlines guidance that applies to every social media channel a chapter runs, whichever platform it is on. Platform-specific notes are collected at the end.

Should my chapter be on social media?

A social media account is a commitment: someone has to post, read replies, and keep the profile up to date. The benefits are usually worth it:

• Raising the voices of RLadies+.
• Promoting chapter activities and events.
• Sharing opportunities and networks, both local and global, with your members.
• Finding RLadies+ members around the world.
• Discovering R content.

One account you can keep active is better than four you cannot. Pick the platform your local community already uses and start there.

Which platforms?

• Pick where your people already are. Platform popularity differs a lot between regions, and what works for one chapter will not work for another.
• Chapters are currently on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and X, in different combinations. The global accounts are listed under Global social media management.
• If your local community uses a tool that is not listed there, feel free to create an account, page, or group there. It might even be a messaging group, if that fits the local culture and your data protection rules — bear in mind that some people are not comfortable sharing a phone number. If you do, please contribute guidance for it to this page based on your experience.

Creating a chapter account

• Follow the platform’s own sign-up guidance.
• Use your chapter email address, never a personal email address. Organisers change; the chapter account has to survive that.
• Add the chapter username to the chapters data so it is listed on the global website. The social_media block takes one key per platform, for example bluesky, mastodon, linkedin, instagram, facebook, youtube, twitter and website.

Naming and profile alignment

• Use the @RLadiesLocation handle format where the platform allows it, for example @RLadiesLondon or @RLadiesSF. Handles drop the plus, since most platforms do not allow special characters. Where a platform caps handle length, abbreviate — an airport code works well, as in @RLadiesCDMX.
• Set the display name to “RLadies+ Location”, for example “RLadies+ London”.
• Use the RLadies+ logo and brand colours for the profile picture.
• For a banner or background image, a picture of your city or of one of your meetups works well. There are no strict rules here.
• Link to your Meetup group page, or your chapter website, in the profile’s link field.
• Pin a post where the platform supports it — the next event is a good choice — and keep it current.
• Suggested bio: “RLadies+ [Location] is part of a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community… [any other text]. #RLadies #rstats”. If you have room left, add the rladies.org link.

Hashtags and tagging

• Tag your RLadies+ related posts with #rladies. This makes them searchable and more visible.
• Add #rstats when the post is about R itself.
• If your chapter has a visitor from another chapter, take a photo and share it with #rladiesvisits.
• If you are posting about RLadies+ in Latin America, consider adding #RLadiesLatAm.
• Event-specific tags (#PositConf, #useR, #LatinR) are worth adding when they apply.
• On tagging the global accounts: tag them when you are referring to the global organisation. If you mean RLadies+ in general, use the hashtag instead — otherwise you make the global accounts’ notifications harder to follow.

Where to find R content to amplify

• The #rstats and #rladies hashtags and feeds on the platforms you are on.
• The R Weekly newsletter.
• Other sources.

Accessibility

• Always add alternative text to images and GIFs, describing the image and any text shown in it, for people using screen readers.
• Write hashtags in camel case: #awesomePackage reads better in a screen reader than #awesomepackage.
• Do not use many emojis at once — screen readers read every one of them out.
• If you make an infographic to promote an event, post the same information as text as well, or link to a page that has it (“Find all information at <url>”).

Use guidelines and code of conduct

The chapter accounts should be used to promote:

• The work of individual RLadies+ members — open source projects, blog posts, academic research.
• Your chapter’s events and announcements, and online RLadies+ events.
• Tutorials or R-related resources you think are really great, even if an RLadies+ member did not write them.

Reposting other people’s posts that promote RLadies+ work and events is encouraged — most of what a healthy chapter account does is amplify other people.

We encourage posting photos from events, as long as you have the participants’ okay — see the example text under Meetup alignment. We love images, animated GIFs and emojis as a form of expression 😸 — with alternative text, as above.

Don’t:

• Don’t use a chapter account as a personal account. No personal posts, no heavy self-promotion.
  • Write “we”, not “I”.
  • Promoting the #rstats work of RLadies+ members, including your own, is fine — just don’t over-do it, and don’t promote work unrelated to R or RLadies+.
  • Avoid individual selfies; group photos, including group selfies, are fine.
• Don’t make political statements from a chapter account. Use your personal account for political speech.
  • Feminist and gender-minorities-in-tech topics are fine. Stay away from party politics — it divides the community, and RLadies+ is non-partisan.
• Don’t promote products or commercial offerings.
  • Open source R projects backed by a company (Posit, for instance) are fine.
  • Thanking an event host or sponsor is fine.
  • Only promote a book if it can be read online for free.
• Don’t compare people’s work unfavourably. “Tidyverse is awesome!” rather than “Tidyverse is better than base R!”.

Handling negative interactions

If your chapter or personal account is attacked or criticised:

• Reach out to your support network — other organisers in the organisers’ Slack, for a start. You do not have to handle it alone.
• You can choose to respond or not. A troll is not worth your energy, though you might answer to educate others reading the exchange. Saving your energy is a valid choice.
• Use the platform’s own tools to protect the account and your energy. Most platforms offer some combination of:
  • blocking an account,
  • muting it, so you stop seeing it without it knowing,
  • reporting it — and you can ask others to report a problematic account too, by writing in the organisers’ Slack,
  • hiding replies to your own posts, to keep a thread clean,
  • on platforms that support it, a “soft block” — blocking and immediately unblocking an account to remove it as a follower.
• Consider keeping the chapter account’s direct messages closed.
• If your chapter posted something wrong or hurtful, apologise.

Platform notes

Facebook

Facebook is popular in some parts of the world, in particular Latin America — for example R-Ladies Santa Rosa.

Page or profile? Weigh the differences: a profile is capped at 5000 friends while a page has no limit on followers, but a profile’s posts show up in friends’ feeds by default and a page’s posts do not — followers have to opt in.

Name the page or profile and fill in the information field following the general naming and profile alignment rules above. Facebook gives you room for more, so also include:

• The link to your Meetup group and to rladies.org.
• Your chapter email address, your chapter accounts on other platforms, and the global accounts.

X (formerly Twitter)

X was the dominant RLadies+ platform for years, and many chapter accounts there still exist. The global organisation stopped posting on X after the platform’s 2022 change of ownership and keeps @RLadiesGlobal dormant only so that nobody can take the handle and impersonate us. The global account’s posts up to that point are archived at rladies.org/tweet-archive/rladiesglobal/.

Chapters are free to decide what to do with an X account they already have. Whichever you choose, do it deliberately:

• Keep it dormant — hold the handle so it cannot be impersonated, and pin a post saying where you have moved. This is what the global organisation does.
• Keep posting if that is where your local community still is.
• Delete it only if you are sure: the handle becomes available to anyone once you do.

Do not expect the global accounts to amplify what you post on X — they are not reading it.