Q: School Social Media
I've just joined a small school as the communications director. This is a newly created position by the school. I'm reviewing the school's social media, and I'm finding is a hot mess - multiple pages for each department across Facebook and Instagram. These pages have mostly been managed by teachers and parents. It will be a delicate cleanup. My question is, HELP! No really, as I begin the cleanup, what are the standards for a school's Facebook / Insti pages? Does the school have 1 primary page with department groups? Or do schools tend to have a Page for each school department, i.e. Athletics, Arts, Etc? Thank you for the help! From Jean Hallman, Covenant Academy, Director of Communications
A: Simmons
We wrote an article on this very topic.
The short answer is it makes sense to consolidate so your profiles are managed according to brand standards and strategy, as well as making it easy for the right profile to be found by prospective families.
It's rare that profiles would need to be managed by students or parents. That's not recommended as they won't be there for the duration and may not be following brand guidelines.
You should also review or create a Social Media Policy for the school to ensure everyone is on the same page with regards to rules, privacy and the like. It would also guide staff participation in the social media process.
You can find the post here: https://mixeddigital.com/blog/why-you-need-to-consolidate-your-schools-social-media-profiles/
A: Newberry
Ideally, you will want to have only one Facebook and Instagram account for the school. When you have multiple accounts, it becomes difficult to manage and it dilutes the brand. For specific areas, I would recommend that they be allowed to set up private Facebook groups. This provides a specific outlet for their posting that is not public.
A: Abrahams
In general, it’s best to streamline your social media presence whenever possible. It strengthens your brand, prevents audience fracturing, and ensures you have plenty of engaging content for frequent posts.
I typically recommend to clients that they have one profile for each of their social platforms, i.e., one Facebook and one Instagram. Exceptions might include a second Twitter account dedicated to athletics updates and score reports, or an alumni-only Facebook group.
However, the real key to effective social media management is having a clearly articulated strategy for each platform. This includes identifying your target audience (Facebook insights can give you great demographic data), establishing a purpose and objectives for the account, developing a content calendar to help you achieve your goals, using data to measure the efficacy of your efforts, and then adjusting your tactics based on what you learn from the data.
A: Noakes
I get it! It’s tough when coming into a new role and finding numerous accounts set up on numerous platforms with no clear, defined strategy to back it up. The first thing to do before making any decisions, is to carry out an audit of all channels/pages, current content, the faculty member responsible, handle naming, follower count and post frequency. This will help you get your house in order and give you the data to back up any decisions made. Next, consider the following:
Does this page/channel add value to our school story?
Does this content exist on a different platform account that serves it better?
Is the platform correct for the type of content? For example, an art account may work wonderfully on a visual platform such as Pinterest or Instagram.
What would be the impact if the account were to be deleted?
As a school marketer (we’re only human!), it is impossible to be in all areas of the school at the same time to snap photos of the authentic side of the school (imagine the 100s of stories that are missed every day ). For this reason, getting staff involved in sharing the story is your key to success, as long as they are trained simply and effectively on how to do so. That said, all social equity must stay with the school, meaning accounts should not be @JohnSmith but @MySchoolSport. Keeping a central bank of all log-in details will help you maintain your content, should any staff members leave in the future, with a swift handover of the account to the new staff member. Once social sharing gets embedded within the faculty thinking, you’ll soon have a team of social experts providing you content to easily curate and share out to your audience.
Get inspired by the stories being created by these schools www.pulaskiacademy.org/media, www.radley.org.uk/media,& www.monktoncombeschool.com/media. You can do it too. Good luck.
A: Major
Penny hit the nail on the head here, and I agree with everything mentioned above. One account per platform is ideal — with Twitter being the "outlier." I often find that coaches really like their own Twitter, and they are really active with it.
One question we often get is how to actually wrangle all of these accounts and get them under control. There are a few important steps here as well:
Start a spreadsheet and log all of the current accounts you can find across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
Send out that spreadsheet to staff and administrators asking them to admit ownership of that account and share the password. For Facebook Pages, these are linked to their personal accounts and they will likely not want to share a password. So rather, they should add you as an admin to the page.
Analyze the frequency of posting and engagement. For an account with great engagement, you'll want to create content that redirects them back to the school's main pages. For pages with little to no engagement, they can simply be deleted. I recommend leaving the "redirect" content up for about two weeks before removing the page entirely.
Create a new set of hashtags that community members can use to share their content in an aggregated space. This also gives you a great opportunity to crowdsource content for your own channels.
For an "active" presence, you'll want at least one post per day on Facebook and Instagram (and no more than two). We usually recommend focusing on Facebook and Instagram if you're a small team. Enlist those same folks who had active channels to help you create content and lessen your workload.
For some more social media best practices, I unlocked our social media guide here: https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1579628030/finalsite/r5sz0vg3slyvnxbb9xjd/TheCompleteSocialMediaGuideforSchools.pdf
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