Managing social media isn’t your full-time job at your school.
Come to think of it – it may not even be in your job description at all!
But it is important to get your district’s stories out to the community, so today we wanted to share five ways to help make social media easier this school year.
- Pick your platforms
Some schools try to do all the social platforms, and they end up being overwhelmed! Facebook is the place to be for your school. Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat, LinkedIn – I love them too. Yet Facebook remains number one.That one piece of wisdom should help a LOT. Focus on Facebook and then move on to others only when you feel you have mastered it. Many awesome schools are still just using Facebook. And that’s OK.
You should be posting at least twice per day on Facebook when school is in session. Does this seem impossible? Well, keep reading! We have more tips to help.
- Create a process to submit content
You can’t possibly be everywhere in your school to take photos. We recommend asking staff to email photos and updates to a central, singular email address.Creating a general social media e-mail address (like socialmedia@myschool.com) will help clear up any questions such as, “Who do I email this to?” Another option would be if the teachers are using social media already in their classroom to make sure they tag the school district in their posts.
Get creative. The easier you make it, the more likely it will be that you get photos.Enlist the help of your administrators to create an expectation of involvement from the staff. If they can help mandate that all staff members to submit one to two items per month, you’ll be overflowing with great stories you can share.
And if they are stumped on what to take photos of, then head to tip number 3!
- Give your staff ideas for what to send
Now that you have a system, you had better make sure that your staff members know what you are looking for. Simple photos or videos of students at work in the classroom do well. Of course you’ll share photos from outside the school as well.
Field trips, special speakers, community projects, business partnerships, scholarships, and more.This helpful list of 100 ideas could be used to get your staff started! Feel free to email this link directly to them.
- Create a district hashtag
Simply put, a hashtag is an easy way for people to search for tweets or posts that have a common topic. In this case, that topic is your school.Hashtags allow everyone to become a storyteller for your school. At any given moment, there are hundreds of things happening inside of your district. If you want a chance for all of those things to shine through, you need a hashtag that everyone uses on social media!
It’s fun to find and then share photos and videos that you locate by doing a hashtag search. If you repost photos on your own school page, you should always give a thank you to the originator of the content. Retweeting is another option to simply share the post on your Twitter feed.
Looking for ideas on great school district hashtags? Check out this helpful article! - Report back on metrics
You must share your social media wins with your staff. If you have a post that reaches 10,000 people, let them know about it! If you receive great comments, make sure to highlight them. Don’t assume your staff reads every post on social media.You should put together a report card to share metrics back with them. If they see the impact you are having, they will likely participate more in the future. Here is an example of a report card we send out to our partner schools. You could easily create one similar to this!
There you go! Five ideas to help make social media much easier this school year. If you have additional questions, don’t hesitate to check out the resources available at www.socialschool4edu.com.
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