You already have the lunch menu in your school newsletter and on your website, so why would you need to post the lunch menu each day on your social media sites?

Easy Answer.

Today’s society wants to be spoon-fed (pun intended). They want the information to come to them, where they are when they need the information.

#SocialSchool4EDU has had tremendous success with delivering the lunch menus to our school audiences on Facebook and Twitter at 4:00 pm the day before. Our followers expect it. Students and teachers alike can count on knowing what is for lunch the next day!

Menu – Thur, 9/10 Breakfast – Pancakes, Applesauce, Juice & Milk Lunch – Turkey Ham Sub, Lettuce w/Tomato Slices, Sun Chips, Pineapple

— New Auburn Trojans (@NewAuburnSchool) September 9, 2015

With the ability to schedule posts into the future, the actual time that it takes to tweet your lunch menu is literally 10-15 minutes each month. Our team takes the printed lunch menu and simply retypes it into a post before the first of each month. We schedule them all at once, for the entire month, so we don’t have to think about it again until the next month.

We schedule it directly in Facebook and all of those posts are automatically posted in Twitter because we have linked the two accounts. Another option can be to schedule out your posts in a free third party tool called Hootsuite.

I see that some schools now have a lunch menu app available in their districts. This may be the only time that I would say it is OK not to post it, but then again, what does it hurt? Having important information such as what’s for lunch in multiple places is great. Especially when you are serving up a popular menu dish like pizza or creamed chicken and biscuit (those were always my favorite).

Try it out—at least for this year—and ask your students, teachers, and parents for feedback. I’m betting that you’ll get a positive response!