There is always something special happening at schools. Always!

Great students. Awesome teachers. Incredible moments.

In our efforts here at #SocialSchool4EDU to further promote inspiring stories from schools celebrating their students and connecting their communities with social media, we are now reaching out to you. Think of it like a self-nomination program. The goal is to share your success with schools across the country. Your story will help encourage and inspire other schools!

Kicking off the fun is a school not far from me in Wisconsin. We are featuring the School District of Amery. I had the pleasure of working with them in a training workshop two years ago. Since then, it has been a true joy watching their story unfold.

This school district located in Northwest Wisconsin has about 1,500 students. They have used social media as an integral piece of their communication strategy with their close-knit community. Tracy Hendrickson, CPP coordinates Community Ed and Communications for the district. She has done an amazing job and recently shared with me some of the keys to their success.

Q: How is social media making an impact in your community?

A: Our social media presence at Amery has been very important to the image of our district. In October of 2015, we merged five separate school-related pages into one district Facebook page and we have now grown to nearly 1300 followers and TONS of family and community engagement. Just in the last week, we have had 69 posts and over 1,400 in engagement.”

Note: This result helps highlight the reason why I like to encourage schools to build one main district Facebook page before branching out to have individual school pages. Tracy actually merged the High, Middle, Intermediate and Elementary pages into the district page. As illustrated above, this has been a huge success!

Q: How do you manage the social media posts?

A: Our Facebook account has six editors who help manage regular Facebook activity. We also Tweet regularly, or should I say, mainly retweet. The school Twitter account follows and receives notifications from at least 20 ‘tweeting’ school staff members, so I retweet a lot of their tweets and generate many of my own, most of which are also on Facebook and Instagram.

Q: How do you use Instagram?

A: We have used Instagram as a tool to reach out to our middle and high school students. Parents are on Facebook, as well as some students, but most students are on Instagram and SnapChat, which we don’t use at this time. I try to focus Instagram posts on photos of our middle and high school students. When school lets out at 3:15, my phone starts to ding steadily with ‘likes’ from students.

Q: How have you seen Instagram play into your social media presence?

A: We created our Instagram in the fall of 2015 and have steadily grown to over 360 followers and have made 223 posts. Anything that appears on Instagram is also on Facebook and/or Twitter. I have found that there is not much engagement on Instagram, just lots of ‘likes’ from the younger crowd.

Q: Do you use any other platforms to share your story?

A: To add to our social media presence, we started a school APP last fall which uses photos and posts from our FB, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. The photos are displayed on the homepage of the APP and there are links within the APP to each of our social media platforms. Even non-social media users can go to the APP to see the most recent posts via the home page or the links. We also encourage people to use the links from the home page of our website so they can explore our social media whether or not they have private accounts.

What a marvelous success story from a small school. Tracy’s continued efforts have helped in so many ways. I have a few friends with children in the district, and they can’t say enough about how connected they feel to the school because of social media.