Social Media for the New Year

It's nearly 2017. When the new year starts you've got returning students and maybe even some new teachers! How can you help these new members of your community feel involved? Social Media is a fantastic way for schools to engage with their community, read our tips for getting off on the right foot.

Making your social media accounts visible

Once you've got your social media accounts up and running, it's a good idea to let your community know what they are.
You can shout about your Social Media accounts in any letters home, emails that you send out. We'd strongly recommend adding your social profiles to your website, and you could also consider adding it to your letter head and any templates so it's included as part of the school brand and identity.

Make regular use of your social media channels

Keeping your social channels up to date is important as parents should be able to see new content frequently. Choosing the right person within school to keep these up to date is essential but that doesn't mean they have to do all the work!

Other teachers should be sending them content regularly and you may even choose to have a few accounts for different areas of the school (such as PE or Drama clubs), as well as a main school account that can repost from the others to keep a busy timeline.

Use social media to push visitors to your website

Use your social channels to drive visitors to key content on your website. Regular news articles on your website are really important, and you can use your social media channels to raise their profile and distribute that information in another way. Using social media to key content from your website is a great way to communicate with your pupils, their families and the rest of your school community within the social media applications that the majority of them will be regularly using.

Top Tip: A link to the content on your website within a social post on the channel(s) of your choice alongside a relevant accompanying image and some text is one of the best ways to share your website content.

Combine your blogs and social media!

Blogging is a great way to get your students involved in your website and social media. With the Schudio CMS you can create accounts for your students to be able to write their own blog posts for the school website, which will go live with approval from an administrator.

Then use your social media channels to pull out highlights from your blog content and share that alongside a link to read the full article.

Top Tip: Consider encouraging new students to blog about their initial experiences within the school or older students to write advice blogs with their younger peers in mind. All of this will help tell the story of your school from a unique and interesting perspective.

Giving pupils the chance to contribute to the online presence of your school can help them to feel more involved, and linking to these blog posts via your social media channels can give them an even larger audience, and hopefully direct more traffic to your website.

Download our FREE Schudio School Website Planner which includes insightful, helpful advice on key tasks and when to carry them out. All throughout the year we’ll email you with time-sensitive content so your website never drifts out of control.

If you're struggling with setting up your social media accounts, or want some assistance or advice on how to make best use of the tools available come along to one of our training sessions. We run a social media training session ideal for schools looking to improve how they engage on social networks, or want to get started. View details of our training sessions here.