Nowadays, more and more Independent schools are coming to social media and with good reason too. Social media offers the promise of inbound marketing, improved search engine optimisation (SEO), branding and the ability to engage with the many constituencies involved in independent schools. (All of these at very little or no cost all).
The problem however, is that once independent schools create their social media accounts, they are never quite sure how to properly use them.
When you have created an account, a good rule for maximising the success of using social media like Twitter for example, is the 75/25 per cent rule. 75% of the content you tweet should indeed be all about your school – Its’ achievements, its’ values, goals, current happenings, news and programs. The other 25% should NOT be about your school, but about topics that are nevertheless, very complimentary to your school, like the local community news or events happening.
Below are 35 ways that you can use Twitter as an independent school. Remember, these are just ideas to help you get started with your tweets. It is by no means, a comprehensive or exhaustive list, but it will help you kick start your tweet ideas.
1. Photos: Contents with photos automatically brings you closer to your followers. Try tweeting photos of your new teachers with a great but fun description of them!
2. Feed your independent schools’ current news RSS feed to your schools Twitter account automatically.
3. Tweet your school’s sports scores and results.
4. Tweet articles from local papers that discuss your school.
5. Encourage attendance to a school performance by taking a short video of the dress rehearsals and tweeting about it.
6. Tweet your daily lunch menu and or a recipe of a popular dish on the menu.
7. Tweet changes in daily schedule.
8. Tweet cancellations due to weather or major works.
9. Tweet quotes from meetings that are informational or memorable.
10. Tweet inspirational or memorable quotes from books that are currently been read by a particular year. Remember to give author’s credit!
11. Tweet about job openings at your school.
12. Tweet a picture ‘pic-of-the-day’. Make it a habit!
13. Tweet about upcoming events, such as open day, admission, registration. Include a link to register.
14. Tweet Alumni events. Include a registration link.
15. Tweet new additions to your library. Where possible, include a photo.
16. Tweet your calendar of events and invite parents or followers to join.
17. Ask individual teachers to tweet ‘Questions-of-the-day’.
18. Create an Alumni twitter list.
19. Create a Twitter list of faculty and staff.
20. Create a Personal Learning Network (PLN) by reaching out to colleagues at other schools via Twitter.
21. Tweet items from other social media networks.
22. Share news and articles relevant to your school.
23. Tweet interesting historical facts about your school
24. Tweet local news and happenings, that will be of interest to your ‘families’.
25. Tweet ALL of your school’s blog post.
26. Tweet interesting educational quotes once a day.
27. Tweet/ask a question and ask your followers to help you with the answer.
28. Conduct a local Twitter search for answers to questions posed by people with the help of others.
29. Instead of emails, try using Twitter to communicate with other people.
30. Communicate with other schools too via Twitter.
31. Invite other schools to your events via twitter.
32. Tweet many encouraging messages for your schools’ sports team.
33. Tweet your schools’ academic achievements.
34. Tweet your schools’ website or page link to a particular story, event or programme.
35. Tweet your schools’ logo often. Make it synonymous with your name. It’s your schools’ identity after all.
Although we have been using Twitter for years now, we still feel like there is so much more for us to learn from this social media channel, but we are hopeful that the above pointers will help you to start using Twitter for your school, as well as for yourself.
So keep them handy and start tweeting….Enjoy!
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Written by Gayle Thompson @SwoopStudios
