Four Ways to Make Your School’s Social Media Presence a Success

By now, you are probably tired of hearing how your school must have an online presence and be active on social media. There is no disputing the importance of social media for schools. But, what’s often missed is the understanding of how to get the most out of your school’s social media accounts.

In this blog, we highlight four key considerations for schools seeking to establish a strong social media presence going forward.

1. Write and Follow a School Social Media Policy

A major factor that often prevents schools from making the post out of social media is the real risk of something going wrong. And it’s a valid fear, given that putting out the wrong messages can potentially do a lot of damage.

To solve this issue, the implementation of a school social media policy is essential. It instills set-in-stone rules and comprehensive social media guidance for teachers. By following the regulations set out in a thorough policy, contributors can feel secure in the knowledge they won’t fall foul of the dangers of social media.

When writing a social media policy for teachers and contributors, you should provide guidance on the following areas:

• Account Sharing
• Content
• Style and Tone
• Posting Comments
• Point of View
• Safeguarding
• Staff Responsibilities
• Policy Enforcement
• Unauthorised Activity

School social media policies are not short documents. They should cover every aspect of your school’s social media usage and put clear rules in place. If your school’s policy fails to do so, you could face a social media disaster.

At Eduprise, we write policy and guidance robust enough to ensure you approach school social media with confidence. Find out more about how we help schools with strategy and planning here.

2. Develop a Well-researched Social Media Strategy

Neglected social media accounts reflect badly on schools. Posting regularly will keep your school firmly in your audience’s mind. However, don’t be fooled; an active social media account isn’t always a good one.

An understanding of your audience, what they want to know, and when to reach them, is invaluable for schools. This information helps to guide social media strategies for schools. You should also refer back to these before launching any school social media campaign.

Crucial to understanding your audience is listening to them. Knowing what your audience is saying adds an extra dimension to your school’s social media plan. Mention is a fantastic tool that allows you to track online conversation about your school and local area. The program monitors more than 1 billion online sources daily, including social media. With this understanding, you can create a plan that directs the narrative about your school.

Putting together your school’s first social media plan is challenging. That’s where we can help. If you’d like to start a conversation about transforming your school social media, get in contact today.

3. Use Analytics for Quality Assurance

There is always room for improvement. Not all your school’s social media campaigns will be outright successes or indeed flawless. But how do you monitor their performance and know where you need to make improvements?

Modern social media analytics tools offer extensive insight into the performance of your posts. In fact, most social media channels offer their own form of analytics. For example, Twitter displays how many likes, retweets, and comments a post attracts. These basic social media metrics provide a low-level understanding of performance. But, more in-depth analysis is also available.

A great tool for monitoring your school’s social media accounts is Hootsuite. This social media management tool allows you to compose and schedule posts. But, its value for analysis comes from its social media reports. At the click of a button, you can create a report on the performance of your school’s social media over a period of time. The analysis provided includes:

• Number of Posts
• Number of Followers or Likes
• Post Engagements
• Traffic
• Sentiment of Inbound Messages

The final social media metric analyses the messages your school receives. It categorises them as positive, neutral, or negative. This affords you an immediate insight into the recent sentiment toward your school.

Using the statistics offered by social media analysis, you can refine your school’s social media strategy. In doing so, you can increase engagement with ,and maximise the reach of, your posts.

Prepare, Produce, Monitor, Refine

Taking the time to prepare — whether in the form of a policy or a school social media strategy — will help you avoid future issues. Once you have produced content, it should be monitored and analysed to assess its success. Using the findings, refine your social media strategy to improve results.

Establishing an effective social media presence takes time and effort that schools don’t always have. The Eduprise team is vastly experienced in setting up and managing social media accounts for schools. If you want a highly sought after social media presence, contact Eduprise team.

To learn more about how your school can make the most of social media, take a look at our social media guide for schools