Twitter/Facebook Social Media Posts - how do you send them out

[Obee1]

Hi all

 

We have been on Twitter and Facebook for about 5 years now. Our success is very limited - we have just a few hundred subscribers and our content is not eye-catching/regular enough to really engage people.

 

Our Head wants us to start using social media more, but as I have explained to her, one of the challenges that we face is getting good quality regular content.

We are now down to just 2 IT technical staff - me and one other guy and we are run off of our feet, particularly as I also line manage the business support and facilities management too.

Everyone here is very busy, so I don't see this shift being easy.

 

Last week we staged a marketing meeting and got quite a bit of staff interest in involvement, however I think our Head doesn't want to load any more of this work onto teachers.

I have said that I am happy to post things up, but that I need the content delivered to me rather than me walking around trying to find an interesting lesson to tweet about.

 

I have setup a shared folder on the network and some staff have also begun emailing me content, not yet realising that captions (and 140 character restricted captions) are required.

 

So how does everyone do it?

 

Do you allow certain "champions" to have access to the Twitter and Facebook accounts and tweet live from departments? We are a little concerned for moderation and security of the account details on this, but are open that it could be an option...

 

Do you have a shared folder? Perhaps with dates on it or something?

 

Do they email it to you?

 

Do you outsource your marketing?

 

How does it work in your school?

 

Any advice appreciated.

[Katy]

We have about 20 different accounts, the main account is run by the deputy head in charge of marketing (we're an Independent School) and each department head runs their own subject based twitter (or delegates it to one of their teachers). The main account then mostly re-tweets the more interesting posts from all the other accounts.

 

The most involvement we have as technical is to help them create the twitter account and maybe show them how to change the profile picture etc.

[Obee1]

We have about 20 different accounts, the main account is run by the deputy head in charge of marketing (we're an Independent School) and each department head runs their own subject based twitter (or delegates it to one of their teachers). The main account then mostly re-tweets the more interesting posts from all the other accounts.

 

The most involvement we have as technical is to help them create the twitter account and maybe show them how to change the profile picture etc.

 

Thanks. We were thinking of doing this, as department head's were quite keen - well some of them.

The problem of moderation then reared it's head and there is also a feeling that it's difficult enough to get our students and parents to follow one account, let alone all of these other ones. We kind of envisage parents then saying that they haven't heard about something and are following on twitter only for it to transpire that they're not following the correct account.

 

Have you or do you have any issues like this?

[Katy]

Thanks. We were thinking of doing this, as department head's were quite keen - well some of them.

The problem of moderation then reared it's head and there is also a feeling that it's difficult enough to get our students and parents to follow one account, let alone all of these other ones. We kind of envisage parents then saying that they haven't heard about something and are following on twitter only for it to transpire that they're not following the correct account.

 

Have you or do you have any issues like this?

The Deputy Head i/c marketing has regular (think it's once or twice a term or half term) "tweet meets" where I assume he goes through the type of things he wants to see posted, but it's left up to the individual head of department as to what they post and to use their professional judgement as to whether it's appropriate or not.

 

Parents are encouraged to follow the main school account which re-tweets anything like upcoming events from the individual feeds etc, but those whose kids are really into the music/drama/sport etc usually also follow the appropriate subject twitter too.

[pooley]

We have 1 main school account and ALL teachers have the login details and are encouraged to post and share content as much as possible. Anything posted on twitter is mirrored to FB.

[mavhc]

Hi all

 

We have been on Twitter and Facebook for about 5 years now. Our success is very limited - we have just a few hundred subscribers and our content is not eye-catching/regular enough to really engage people.

 

200 followers out of how many potential? For Twitter that seems high, not that many people "get" Twitter. For Facebook business pages it might be a bit low, but then Facebook deliberately doesn't show everyone all your posts to get you to pay them

[RichCowell]

We've got 911 students, with 895 followers on the main school Twitter, and 2136 on Facebook, but we have various different additional ones for subject-specific stuff...

 

The key thing for us was having a team of staff with access, and the right staff, from different areas, so they can engage more... and we make sure at least one person on every trip has access so they can post content while they're away (obviously with permissions from all parents etc.) - that had a huge impact on engagement for us...

The other important thing for us has been having staff from the Pastoral team as we've left messaging enabled, and parents often use it to contact us, so they're able to reply quickly that way...

 

The staff on there are editors, and I'm the only Admin, so maintain control to remove them easily when they leave etc.

 

All content from Facebook is Tweeted, and all Tweets are posted to Facebook too, so I've given the office staff access to Tweet, so we don't need to give them access to Facebook (not all are on it)... Works really well for us...

Edited July 3, 2017 by RichCowell

[browolf]

we have a media apprentice who runs the school website (CMS) and the main twitter account. Since part of her job is to collect news stories for the website these can be mirrored on to twitter. Some departments and the Library have their own twitter accounts and so a lot of the content on the main account is retweets from the other departments. Our main account has 1100 followers, the rest have between 150 and 300 followers. This is the 2nd apprentice we've had doing this. The first finished her apprenticeship and got a job with the company who host our website & CMS!

[mavhc]

What do you do about Facebook not showing all page posts to all members if you don't pay them?

[RichCowell]

What do you do about Facebook not showing all page posts to all members if you don't pay them?

 

Nothing, there's not much you can do about that really... it's not an issue that's been flagged up with us so far...

[colly72]

We have a Wordpress-based website. All our news stories are automatically posted to Twitter & Facebook, using the SNAP plugin, which reduces the workload massively. Then, we also have one member of staff who is also able to manually post stories, posts etc to our official school Twitter/Facebook pages. We also have a number of departmental Twitter pages, which each department posts to from time to time. As an independent school, we've made great efforts to maxmise our social media presence and it has made a big difference to the way our school is promoted and perceived. Although we do monitor our feeds, we've had very little negative/offensive comments, so the good definitely outweighs the bad for us.

[Obee1]

Thanks to all for contributions.

 

On further investigation I became a little more keen on the department accounts for Twitter and not listing these as searchable and then just retweeting stuff out.

 

Have just been to a meeting however and the initial stage of this is going to be emailed to us and we tweet it out.

I'm a bit worried that this will still involve lots more work going backwards and forwards before the tweet is "ready" but will see.

 

Thanks guys and girls.

[Sylv3r]

We've got department twitter accounts as well as a whole school twitter and facebook page. The IT Support staff add all the annoucements to the main school pages / retweet anything shared with us etc and monitor the content of the departments pages too and retweet that if it's useful.

 

We've got 3,438 facebook folllowers and 1,633 on twitter.

[mavhc]

I did look into facebook groups, but everyone in the group can see the member list, so that's no good. I'm planning to set our new website with WebNotifications so visitors can just subscribe there, we're paying for the website, no need to pay facebook too. Surprised facebook don't have a non profit system for pages.

[AJWhite1970]

We have over 50 twitter accounts and about 6000 followers. I share overall management and censorship of every account with the HM, each departmental HOD is responsible for their own twitter account, the PE team have access to 12 different accounts, one for each sport and are amazing at tweeting live at all events. I have a group heading to Cambodia in the morning that have just picked up the password to our trips feed, another group heading out to Australia next week are doing the same. The HM walks round the site and often tweets stuff direct from his phone and he covers many weekend events he attends. Twitter is heavily used here and is part of every web page.

 

I have one twitter email account and every twitter account has an smtp alias to that account so I have a one stop place where I can see all activity for every account. In 5 years I've had to censor 2 posts and block 5 users (all of which were nice Russian ladies offering services not suitable to a school!!!). The HM also manages the Linked-In account himself so he keeps connected with all the old students. I'm really lucky to have a HM that is so social media focussed for such an old school (130 years old)

 

Feel free to PM me if you want some links to what we do

Andrew

Edited July 4, 2017 by AJWhite1970

[mavhc]

What do you do if people start replying to tweets with age inappropriate things?

[AJWhite1970]

Delete the tweet and block the user asap. As I get all the activity for every account emailed to my phone I can usually react pretty quickly to misuse, replies, likes, follows etc as I have all 50 accounts on my twitter app!!

[RichCowell]

Delete the tweet and block the user asap.

 

Ditto... We've not actually had that happen yet, but that's what we've arranged to do...

[mavhc]

Would be annoying if you had some good responses to the same tweet though