Twitter is a great tool for schools to communicate with parents and the wider community, tweeting regularly and consistently is important as you want people to keep coming back for more. Not every school has the budget to hire a social media expert, and this is where Tweetdeck comes in handy!

Tweetdeck is a social media dashboard that you can use to manage your Twitter accounts in one easy place. As well as being a place for you to send out your tweets and view others' timelines, there's many other great features that could be handy to those managing a School's Twitter account. It's owned by Twitter itself so you know it's a site you can trust!

Scheduling tweets
Not every school can have a dedicated social media expert. Some teachers may only have a few minutes per day to send out a tweet which can  mean your feed is inconsistent and quite empty. The ability to schedule tweets means you can sit down for 30 minutes a week and plan out what you will tweet and what time, and twitter does all the work for you. It's great to be able to send out tweets constantly throughout the day or even at 3pm to target parents who are on their phones whilst waiting to pick the kids up!

Customisable panels
You can set up each of your panels to suit you. You can have one that searches Twitter for things such as '#edtech' which will allow you to see all tweets that feature that hashtag and join in the conversation. panel could be displaying your mentions so that you can reply to people efficiently. You could even have a panel that shows another school's account so you can get some tweet ideas!

Adding contributors without giving out the password
Another great thing about Tweetdeck is that you can add extra contributors to be able to tweet from the school's Twitter account without having to know the password. They simply log in with their own accounts and can tweet from either their account or the school's account. This is great as obviously, staff can come and go and having to change the password each time would be a pain!

Are you already using Twitter and other forms of social media at your school? If not, then Tweetdeck may make it a little easier for you.

We run regular Social Media for Schools training sessions here in Lancashire, For more information please visit our events page.