Creating a social media process

Your school staff will be contributing the stories and messages that make up your social media content. The communications lead in your district or at your school tends to be the gatekeeper, but there might be some teachers or your principal who embrace social media and want to create posts.

Who gets the keys to your school account is obviously up to you, but once a post is published, the entire school community can participate in liking and sharing posts. That's what you want after all: to accelerate sharing and the effect of all the positive posts.

One of your goals ought to be to encourage participation by other stakeholders in your school: parents, staff, students and community members. They call it 'social' media for good reason, so start some dialogue. 

Tips for gathering content:

Request content submissions
Solicit content by setting up a form on your website and invite faculty, staff, students and others to submit news for sharing.

Don't leave anyone out
Be sure to routinely have something for each of your audience groups. (e.g., you want parents learning about teachers, and vice versa)

Vary your content
Establish topic clusters to generate stories around. (e.g., teacher excellence, classroom innovation, extracurriculars, etc.)

Get permission
Provide a media release form on your website for parents to sign, permitting photos to be posted in the school’s social media.

Scheduling your content is just as important as creating the content itself. Before you commit, however, to participating in one channel or another, make sure you do just that – commit. Don’t neglect a channel and allow it to “gather dust” or else you run the risk of alienating those who engaged you through that channel. Frequency is key in the social media world. Arrive at a frequency you can live with, then stick to it. The last thing you want to do is disappear from the conversation.

So, how often should you post new content? While the short answer is, “not often enough,” it helps to work off a schedule. There are some general rules of thumb but most of those are dictated by the content writing resources your school has. Regardless of the amount of resources you have, a social media content planner is great way to keep your content organized and on schedule.

Scheduling guidelines:

• Create a content planning spreadsheet that contains a schedule of all social media posts, broken down by type (e.g., image, link, blog, etc.)
• Include a status field to show follow-up posts
• Auto count the characters to ensure description fits within the required amount
• Schedule some time yourself (30 minutes per week) planning your release schedule.
  
  

See Andrea Gribble's 7 Keys to creating the perfect school Facebook page.

Because social media is all about creating a following and building it up, you should be promoting your school’s social media involvement at every turn.

Begin encouraging people to follow you using your non-social school communications: e-mails, take-home materials, school signage, community cable – you name it. You can never have too many followers or too many ways to promote people to follow you. Then certainly use all your social channels to cross promote using links and hashtags.

• Post signs around schools and the districts
• Include your social media addresses on all printed material (e.g., school plays and athletics programs)
• Put social media on the agenda at parent orientations, parent-teacher meetings and promote on all mailings.
• Take inventory of all extracurricular groups and brainstorm ways to promote social media involvement.
  
  

Be prepared by having a sound interactive process in place to keep the dialogue going. Parent engagement can spread quickly, and you don't want to be asleep at the switch and miss replying to posts and comments. Once the dialogue starts, it’s best to have a plan to both promote the good stuff and handle the not-so good stuff.

Foremost, you need to monitor your channels and be responsive. While you most certainly want to empower many staff content contributors, it's best to have just one individual ultimately responsible for keeping the social dialogue going. This can be accomplished when setting up your structure and granting permissions.

You can learn a great deal about your school community through social media.

When negative comments surface:

Some parents or parent groups can be outspoken, and social media emboldens them to speak out, so it's doubly important to respond accordingly to negative comments.
Respond as soon as possible, but it’s especially important to address negative comments and discussion quickly and directly. 

• Set up authority workflows for different type of issues. (e.g., a bad comment about a teacher will automatically be brought to the principal’s attention)
• Flag certain words and subjects with ‘forbidden’ alerts.
• Establish a contingency event negative information is being spread. This can be addressed in various methods including direct comments or responses.
• Require approvals for any responses that are high-risk