Table of contents

  1. Introduction to social media
  2. Writing for social media
  3. Personality and tone of voice
  4. Structuring a tweet
  5. Structuring a Twitter thread
  6. House style for the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) social media
  7. Tagging official accounts
  8. Hashtags
  9. Images for social media
  10. Alt text and accessibility
  11. Other support for creating social media content

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Personality and tone of voice

Our social media content should be written in a less formal language than how we write on the website to replicate the way that people usually speak. With this in mind, we should:

  • use the active voice instead of the passive voice (“we collected data” instead of “data were collected”)
  • use contractions (“don’t”, “we’ve”, “can’t”)
  • ask questions
  • address the user as “you” (“You can read our full release here”)
  • refer to the organisation as “we” and “us” instead of “ONS”; if necessary, we should say “the ONS” (for example, when comparing with data from another source)