Creating original social media content on a daily basis can be exhausting. Save time and work ahead by tapping into the power of Social Media Features!

These ideas are proven to attract positive engagement to your school’s social media accounts.

1. STAFF FEATURES

Your community loves to learn more about the staff working in your school district! If you’re not doing regular features of your staff, you are missing out. There are a variety of ways to highlight them.

• New staff – post a staff-submitted photo and bio when they start. Include things like where they are from, what they enjoy doing in their free time, and why they’re excited about working for your school.
• Generic staff – pull a school photo for a graphic and give them a shout-out by name. You can rotate among school buildings for these recognitions. Start with some of your most well-known staff members and make sure to highlight teachers, administrators, support staff, and paraprofessionals. We see some of the highest engagement on posts featuring bus drivers or custodians!
• Staff-submitted – ask staff members to nominate their colleagues. The post could include a video of the person’s nomination statements, or simply a photo of that staff member in action with a description of why they were nominated. Peer-to-peer recognition like this can help build employee morale!
• Community-nominated – create a Google form for anyone to share appreciation. Parents and other members of your district will have a place to recognize how a staff member goes above and beyond in their role. This allows those little acts of kindness (or big ones, too) to be recognized.
• Retirement – celebrate staff members with stories and tributes upon retirement. You should reach out to your retirees to see if they want to be recognized in this way. I sure hope so, because your community will want to wish them well. You can post a current photo or even do a collage showing them years ago when they started with the district. You could include some details about their career or just thank them for their dedication to your school.

Worried that highlighting one staff member will make others feel left out? You can’t worry about that! If you don’t highlight anyone, then no staff members will be recognized. When you sing praises of one person, it reflects well on the entire district!

       

2. STUDENT FEATURES

Within your school, you have so many success stories. These stories come from your students! Make sure your social media is celebrating your students regularly. If you have a weekly or monthly recognition program already set up, make it a priority to share photos of those students on social media.

If you don’t have anything set up yet, set up a simple system, such as a Google form, for staff members to nominate students to be featured on social media. You can go out and take photos or just pull photos from the school directory to use. I recommend a simple template that you share each week. The caption of the post will have the nomination details for the student.

You’ll grab new family members as fans of your page, and you’ll reach more people because of those proud parents sharing their child’s recognition.

3. ALUMNI FEATURES

Let’s inspire your community with stories from past graduates! Alumni features are easy to do on social media. 

Find out who some of your notable alumni are from your school and send them a survey to be featured. If you start with some of the well-known graduates, you will drive good interaction and can help attract more responses. Make sure to always include a link to the survey asking for new alumni to respond in each feature you share.

 

 

4. #THROWBACKTHURSDAY

Dust off those old yearbooks and take photos throughout! Post one every Thursday morning, using a simple caption that encourages engagement. Here are 52 ideas for #ThrowbackThursday captions to get you through an entire year.

5. QUESTION OF THE WEEK

Engagement, like comments and shares, are key to getting more views on your social media posts. Asking questions is an easy way to drive those comments. Facebook prioritizes “text-only” posts – with their own colored backgrounds – in the newsfeed. Use this to your advantage by asking fun, engagement-inspiring questions such as “my favorite teacher was _______.”

Here are 52 ideas to get you started.

Not only will you see a high number of comments (some schools have seen more than 1,000), but you’ll also train your community that it’s OK to comment on our school stories. The hope is to drive engagement on other posts as well!

 

6. WHAT I LEARNED THIS WEEK

Record short videos where you ask students what they learned that week in school. No fancy editing is necessary – just a smartphone and a willing student!

Your feature could be a video, an audio clip, or a written quote. If you go with a written quote, make sure you capture a photo of the child, too! 

Schedule time with staff to visit different schools or classrooms each week to share what is being learned with your community. They love to see these stories and students love to be highlighted!

Ok – now it’s time to take action! Which one of these features are you going to add to your social media strategy? Share below!