Best practices for making the most of social media for your school’s parent council.
In this day and age, almost every parent has a smart phone that he or she checks often. Here is where your parent council should be taking advantage of gaining your school community’s attention via the various social media channels.
Before your school council takes on the task of managing and maintaining your various social media channel’s, ask a few key questions.
If you don’t ask, then you don’t know
- Learn how your school community currently participates on social media. Try a simple survey. Either survey your school community on curriculum night or try sending a simple email survey (consider using SurveyMonkey). Your parent council may discover that a majority of your school community is using Facebook rather than Twitter. Or it may be the other way around. Use the information the survey provides to your council’s advantage.
- How will you use social media? You can use it to send frequent event reminders. But the best and most engaging way to capture your school community’s audience is to highlight all the great stuff your parent council does throughout the school year. Don’t forget to ask parent’s to comment on your highlights.
Execution is the real game
- Designate a person on your parent council to be your social media administrator. Limit the number of administrators to one or two people to keep things simple. Have your administrators not only setup accounts, add photos and post information but also have them monitor, moderate and add feedback as needed.
- Connect with the principal, and if possible other school staff to convey what your plan is this year with social media. Technically, you don’t need the principal’s permission, but you’ll be able to do so much more if you work in partnership and share your goals.
Now that you have a plan it is time to take a look at a couple social media channels.
Twitter is a great way to send out short fast bursts of information out to your school community.
For school councils, this channel works best for announcements, reminders and sending out thank yous to volunteers and to the general school community. It is best practice to try and include images in your tweets to help them be more appealing and standout from the rest of the crowd.
Twitter is also a great channel for sharing links to articles and other resources.
Encourage feedback and don’t delete any negative comments unless they are inflammatory or false. It is always best to respond to negative feedback with a helpful and constructive post. Turn a negative into a positive and take advantage of these opportunities to get out the correct information or to clear up a misunderstanding.
Stay focused on building your Facebook community. Promote your page with its URL and ask parents to “like” your page. Create a contest at the beginning of the school year promoting your school council’s Facebook page.
Keep it simple and rely on multimedia to tell your story. A 30 second to 1 min video from your last school event will tell a much better story than a couple of lines of text. Be sure to always include an image when possible.
Whatever channel you use, be it either Twitter or Facebook or other, be sure to plan to have it added to your agenda at parent council meetings. Take some time to discuss what content to post. It helps to plan ahead and will save you lots of time. Try creating a content calendar.
Social Media the great communicator
Using social media can be a great way to communicate with other parents and the wider community. It can help reach more parents, including those who can’t always make it to parent meetings or those who just get caught up in their daily lives. Connecting with the parent community is vital and will help parents to stay engaged and invested in the child’s education.
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