We have discussed in an earlier post how important it is to plan a strategy for your Schools Social Media as a part of your overall parental engagement strategy.
Now the fun part! Creating engaging posts for social media. We will go through the top tips on how to create effective and engaging content that will communicate your message with your audience. Let's get started.
Get your words right…
First of all, when constructing your post you need to know what you’re communicating to your audience.
This can be challenging across some social media channels as you have a limited amount of space for your text. Also, the majority of the time people don’t read long posts. This is because the average person's attention span has gone right down to 8 seconds!
Fun fact: a goldfish attention span is 9 seconds, so the average person today has less of an attention span than a goldfish… so you need to be very clear with your messaging!
For example, if you're promoting an event for your school write the 'when and where', then a short description explaining the event. If people want to know more you can add a link to your website with further details. The main thing to remember here is that you need short and well-constructed wording to get the message across as quickly as possible.
This shouldn't sacrifice the quality of your post, it should enhance it! In your text don’t forget to add your hashtags! Hashtags should be relevant to your post content. You should have at least one hashtag used in your post. This is how people can find your content when they are searching through the internet.
You can post some long posts every now and then if you need to communicate in more depth. There is just a risk of you putting all the effort into writing a post on social media and no-one reading it. This is because of the nature of social media; it's very quick, with instant updates. A great way to encourage people to read your longer posts (and the majority of your content) is to add media to your post such as a photo or video. Adding a media to your post engages people a lot more. The brain, by nature, loves images. As a matter of fact, it processes images 60,000x faster than text. So you should always include a photo or visual!
Choosing images or video for your post
Therefore, the next thing you need to do to create your post is to add your media! You can either have an image or video. Let’s go into more depth on how to use each media to it maximum their potential.
Images
Images make up most of the social media feeds. This is the quickest way to share your message to your audience. An image can be a photo, a creative text base image or both! Photos are great ways to share content. For example, you can share spontaneous photos of the kids at school doing something share-worthy. Parents love seeing their little ones and what they’re up to on a daily basis. (Make sure the children have consent and meet GDPR standards). You can post photos from past events such as a summer fair that you want to encourage families to come to. It's completely up to you what you use and choose to share.
A great option to enhance your post is to create graphics-based images. A simple, fast and highly-effective image tool is Canva. Use it on a desktop or on your mobile and it’s completely free! You can see below the examples I have created using Canva. You simply select a template or upload your own image, you can then add text, select font, colours and layout. Then voila you're done! Canva has preset image sizes for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. This is important since each platform has settings and limitations for images.
A helpful tip when taking photos is to think about which social media platform you are sharing the photo to. Different image orientation (Portrait/Landscape) work best differently on social platforms.
Videos
There are two different types of videos on social media. There are your stories for very quick instant updates and standard videos which can be short or long and informational.
Again when filming video, think about which social media platform you are sharing it to. For example, if you’re filming something for your social media stories portrait is best, for your social feed landscape and portrait can be used. Keep the video short for your stories. There are options to customise your short video. You can add text and edit your video within the social platforms.
It’s completely up to you what image or video you share, you can get super creative with it so make sure to have fun doing it. Then, post away!
One last thing
Make sure to save your evergreen post content. Evergreen is what you can re-use to post again to your social media. For example, you could use an image reminding parents that there is an inset day coming up. This saves you repeating the process of creating the same post over and over again.
Now not only are you an excellent teacher you can add to your CV being a great designer too!
