Navigate Social Media Challenges: Expert Tips for Schools - Ep. 51

How should schools be utilizing social media? What platforms should schools be using? What are some things schools should make sure they aren't posting?

In the latest Digital Wrap-Up, Riley answers these questions and more in a recent interview he did with a client of his. The interview was with Joel Rogers from EvaluWise. EvaluWise is the single most effective digital tool for streamlining and improving the teacher evaluation process, regardless of the evaluation model you are using.

The interview was used for their annual users' conference with school administrators and teachers.

This repurposed interview answers a lot of great questions geared specifically for schools, but also, a lot of these tips can be beneficial for small businesses as well.

Want to discuss best practices for your school or small business? Reach out to Riley today at riley@hardendigital.com.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to support the show, visit https://bit.ly/DigitalWrapUp.

For a free social media consultation, visit https://hardendigital.com/social-media-services/.

Take your social media to the next level with HypeFurry: https://hypefury.com/?via=riley-harden

Transcript

Riley Harden: 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of the digital wrap up. My name is Riley, and I'm the host, and I'm the CEO of hardened digital and design. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different than normal. I recently did an interview with a client of ours. And we talked all things social media for school. So they did an interview with me for one of their upcoming conferences, where we talked about everything from should schools even be on social media, what platforms they should be on what types of content they should create, and what are some things that they should be on the lookout for, you know, or pay attention to and creating content so that they don't get in trouble on social media. It's great interview, a lot of the information obviously is geared towards schools, but it translates well to the small business world as well. So hopefully, you get a lot out of it. And let's just go ahead and jump into it.

Unknown: 1:15

Okay, welcome. Good morning. I'm here today with Riley from harden digital design, he assists us with our social media. And we just thought maybe we'd give our school some tips on using social media, especially in that school or kind of more governmental setting. So welcome, Riley, thank you for joining us.

Riley Harden: 1:37

Yeah, thank you happy to be here and talk all things social media, it's what we do best here at heart and digital and design. So happy to give some tips and pointers and maybe just some ideas for content too, if any of the schools on are just struggling to come up with different ideas. So

Unknown: 1:57

awesome. Great. So we have a few questions we'll go through some of the questions that we get from school sometimes is should they even be on social media? And then also, is there enough content for them to be able to share? So what's what's some of your thoughts on that?

Riley Harden: 2:12

Yeah, I think every school or at least school district should be on social media, at a bare minimum, Facebook. There's such I mean, I think everybody for the most part, and not everybody, but there are millions and millions of people that are using social media that if you aren't using it as a communication platform, and that's really what it is for school districts is a communication platform to reach your audience, whether it's parents, or if you're dealing with high schoolers, even, you know, the older kids in the school system that are on social media as well, it's another communication platform to get your message to get your information to them. So I think, yes, at a bare minimum, every school district should have some type of presence on social media. You know, if you have the ability to have every school, absolutely, that's great. But, you know, if you're starting out or don't have any presence, at least do it from a district wide standpoint, starting out, and there's definitely enough content out there. You know, there's stuff that happens every day in schools that you can be creating content for. And we'll get into some different content ideas later on in the interview. But yeah, I think there's definitely enough out there. Okay. Especially if you're doing it just from a district wide, and then you have step pools pull stuff from

Unknown: 3:46

what about individual staff members or teachers? Should they share from their personal counselor? Should they pass that stuff along to kind of that district one, which

Riley Harden: 3:56

I think it's a tough one. And it's a case by case situation. You know, there's difficulties or challenges that come with allowing school alert staff and teachers to post to their personal, you have a lot less control of what they can say they can write things or share things that maybe shouldn't be shared, or, you know, in a different tone or voice than what the school district or the school would prefer. But I think if done correctly, you know, if you have talks with your teachers, and you have trainings and talk to them about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, it's great to have teachers that want to share, especially, you know, they could create a separate page that's just, you know, Mrs. B's classroom on Facebook or something like that. But I think providing them that guidance is essential there. But, you know, if you don't want to branch out and allow teachers and staff to post on their personal pages, I think setting up a system where they can funnel content back to the communications team or whoever is setting up and running the social media pages so that you can, you know, it's hard for one person to be everywhere and to gather all this different content, photos, ideas, but setting up a system that encourages the teachers to even if they're not sharing on their own pages, but sending it to you in a text message or in an email. And, you know, here's a picture, this is what we did. I think this would be a great piece of content. So

Unknown: 5:32

and as you mentioned, with the first question about content, that's a great way to generate content to you know, like, you've got people eyes and all kinds of places, and there's stuff going on with schools all the time that can be shared, and, you know, people are interested in too. So

Riley Harden: 5:48

yeah, there's, there's a lot of, you know, one off moments that can happen in classrooms that just kind of come naturally throughout the school day, that's, it's hard to plan, you know, you can't always have the communications or social media team there to capture every moment. But you know, if you're having teacher, workdays or meetings, and you can then talk to them about what would be great ideas to capture and send our way then absolutely provide that training that those tips and, you know, it's sort of user generated content in itself. A lot of times you think user generated content from outside of the organization, but in a way, it's internal generated content that can just help you on those days that you're struggling to figure something out to post on your teachers and staff to send you stuff. Yeah.

Unknown: 6:39

So you mentioned when we first started with bare minimum of being on Facebook, are there any particular platforms that you kind of recommend for schools, obviously, are different kinds of clientele than just marketing? It's not like you're blasting out to everything. So any recommendations on which ones they should be on?

Riley Harden: 7:02

Yeah, so I mentioned Facebook, and I think that's definitely the gold standard at a bare minimum that school should be on because you're the audience, that you're probably reaching, you know, the the parents, the grandparents, Facebook is the one that's the demographic that those people are on. And that's probably you know, the most important one to be on at a bare minimum is Facebook. I think Twitter is a great option for schools. And I've seen it done successfully. It's more of a, a newsy platform sharing, you know, updates and blog post or press releases from the school, whatever it may be. Twitter is a great option there. It's a little different in terms of targeting the demographic, I would say, Twitter's kind of all over the place in terms of demographics. But I think if if done successfully, it's another great option, Instagram. You know, if you're doing great on Facebook, and Twitter, and you know, you have a lot of good pictures, obviously, Instagram is all about pictures and videos. If you're able to produce great pictures and videos for Instagram, absolutely explore it. There's a lot of specific targeting with hashtags and tagging locations and things that you can do on Instagram that you can attract a bigger audience and really get people but again, you don't want to be happy sharing blurry photos, or, you know, you can't, it's not great for sharing like just graphics with text on it and things like that. So Instagrams kind of like if you're above going above and beyond than just Facebook and Twitter. It's a great platform, and you know, I'm sure people are wondering, should we be on Tik Tok? Again, that's an above and beyond step. It's something that if you have the team to do it, and you have the time to do it, time is always the big issue here. Tick tock is fun, definitely to be on. But taking time to record different videos and things like that is, is challenging, especially if you're a smaller team or you're a one man or one woman team. But if you have the ability and capability I think, go for it. And if you're struggling to keep up with you're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and you're like Well, it'd be fun to get on Tik Tok. You can also you know, create videos, Instagram reels where you're already on Instagram as a platform. It's the same type of content that you'd be sharing Tik Tok, but you already have that established.

Unknown: 9:42

You can share the videos through Facebook too. Is there a time limit you can have on Facebook? I can't remember

Riley Harden: 9:49

it's a minute or a minute and a half. They keep changing it but yeah, you can well, I guess you can share videos organically on Facebook. There's no time limit, like what you're saying, in terms of the Instagram reels, if you have your Facebook and your Instagram set up, you can actually create reels, which reels is the big, you know that short form content right now you can actually create a reel on Instagram. And you can post it where it shares Instagram reels on Facebook as well. And, you know, they used to say cross posting is not the greatest, but it's actually made specifically to do that if you pull up your phone right now, there's a section on Facebook that specifically for reals as well. So, yeah, I think creating those videos for both Instagram and Facebook, it's all in one. So Sure.

Unknown: 10:43

You mentioned about like, with Instagram with photos, but then you don't want to be sharing blurry photos. What about using that, like stock images or generic images is that something school should be doing or is there some things there,

Riley Harden: 10:57

I would say avoid it. If you can, at all cost. People just see right through it, they don't sure they don't. It's not attention grabbing, it's not going to make people stop scrolling. The idea is you really want to catch people's you want to capture people's attentions. And you have, you know, less than two seconds is kind of the study that you have less than two seconds to capture somebody's attention when they're scrolling through, you know, just doing scrolling on their phone. So you know, people aren't going to stop and look at the stock or, you know, just an image with a lot of text on it or a graphic. Sometimes it's needed, you know, sometimes there's no avoiding it, because you want to get the information out there. But a lot of times, if you can use pictures of kids of pictures of staff, showing people's real faces and images is kind of the gold standard, I even want to show as many real people as possible. So you know, you can, if you're like, Well, I've, I don't have that many people to take pictures of or I don't just want to keep using the same person every single week, the content, shelf life on social media, you can repurpose a lot of old stuff. So say, I took a picture, and Joel is in the picture this week, you know, two weeks down the road, you could use that same picture, for a different instance, or for this similar type post, because people don't remember that you first two weeks ago, it's really like, you could go just a couple of days. And people honestly won't even know. But yeah, avoid using stock. As much as possible. You know, you have all these kids, you have all these staff members to take the pictures of even if you don't think, oh, it's not a super great picture. It's not staged, it's not super professional. Honestly, some of the, the best performing content is just those one off quick pictures and things like that, where you could spend an hour creating a post and you don't get any engagement. But it's just that one quick picture. And it's the biggest post of the month. So

Unknown: 13:15

cool. In terms of using social media, one thing I know, my own kids school used to is to promote, like events and different things. So can you talk about that, or maybe promoting events or fundraisers or different things? Yeah, so

Riley Harden: 13:36

like I said earlier, the social media is just a whole communications platform for you just like email, you know, everybody, I think probably has some type of email communication that they send out to parents and things but you know, more people are likely to engage and actually retain the information, seen it on Facebook instead of just Oh, an email popped up, swipe and delete it, not open it, whatever it may be. So with that being said, you know, you have an upcoming event, whether any type of event event, you know, school finals, or field day or

Unknown: 14:15

graduation, yeah, right for

Riley Harden: 14:18

graduation, posting all the information on the five W's the who, what, when, where, why that type of stuff for events coming up, you know, any type of event, if your school doesn't have a specific social media platform or drawing a blank, but if you don't have a whole separate platform for your athletics, departments, sharing, school, sporting events for different teams, those are always great there too. So yeah, it's not just showing you don't have to just show you know what's going on in the schools like Mrs. B's classroom. That Add, did this arts and crafts, or did this project or anything, you can promote upcoming events as well, because you're going to reach a lot more people. If you establish that following on social media than you might through email, traditional kinds of communication forms.

Unknown: 15:19

So we've talked about content or different events that you can promote, how frequently should people be shared, or schools be sharing to social media to kind of hit their targeted audience,

Riley Harden: 15:32

my general rule of thumb is, at a bare minimum, schools are small, but we work a lot with small businesses. So I touch on this a lot, is you should be posting at least two to three times a week, especially if you're just doing all organic posting, which organic means not running ads, or not boosting or basically just not spending money to get your posts out there to more people. So how do you gain more attention, get more engagement start showing up in people's newsfeeds more is the consistency factor. So if you're just posting once a week, or once every other week, Facebook, the different platforms that our algorithms behind that aren't going to push that post to the people that are following you, you know, you follow, you can follow hundreds of people, you're never going to see every single post by each one of those people that your pages that you follow. But the more that you can post in be showing up in people's newsfeeds, the more that people like your image or share your image or leave a comment. That means the the Facebook and the Twitter and the Instagram algorithms will be like, oh, this person likes that. So they're gonna start seeing your content more and more. But if you're not posting two to three times a week, where you're consistently showing up, you're never going to get that engagement rate, that high engagement rate there. So two to three times a week at a bare minimum. You know, I know, like a lot of schools around me, they're posting multiple times a day, which is great. But again, it's the time factor. So if you can, you know, one post today, or one post in the morning, one post in the evening, you know, when people are sitting around, you know that seven to 9pm time slot when people are kind of just sitting at home, winding down watching TV, you know, everybody, you can't just watch TV without scrolling through your phone nowadays, when people were just sitting around on roleplay pass game, right? Yeah, people sitting around watching their TV shows late at night, that's the perfect time, you know, in that's another point of, you know, you don't have to be the one personally like, I don't have to be on my phone, posting about the school or whatever post you have at nine o'clock at night, the use a tool to schedule your post that helps in that consistency factor. Take a time, you know, take an hour or two at the beginning of the week and schedule all of your posts out for the week. And then you can space it out at 7am and 8pm. And you could get two posts a week, and knock out all of your content in a week. In a two hour timespan or something. So it really saves you time there. There's different tools, especially if you are on Facebook and Instagram, mainly the meta business suite, if you have your business page for your school setup, it's completely free. And allows you to schedule to both Facebook and Instagram and allows you to respond to comments and messages and all that. So definitely look into ways to schedule your posts. If you're like a lot of people who Oh, I don't have time to create all this content, how do I do it? Yeah.

Unknown: 18:55

We talked about a couple ideas for different content of you know, having staff develop content and also promoting some events, any other tips on some ideas for schools, what they could look for in terms of things to help them with content ideas to try to get those two or three posts per week? Or per week? Or even, you know, reaching out to try to do that daily stuff? Maybe? Yeah,

Riley Harden: 19:19

yeah. So especially if you already have a email communication system set up where you're pushing out news through email, you can pull snippets from that, you know, the more you can use the same piece of content or the same information in multiple different ways. So you send out an email blast will shorten it down and create a Facebook post for it as well. So any type of information that you're blasting out through email, you should also just automatically be thinking, oh, let's get this on social media too. Because then you're you're spending just you know, an extra few minutes to repurpose it and put it on social media. So doing that blog post, whatever press releases news about upcoming events that you're pushing through email, all that should just automatically be going through your mind, oh, let's get that on social media to, like we said, you know, the pictures of people always gold in terms of content. So, you know, even if it's faculty highlight highlighting the staff member each week, that's one post a week, and you just know, you're gonna highlight a teacher, or a longtime staff member, whoever it may be. And, you know, don't always focus on the higher ups, you know, the principals and the administrators, they get a lot of face time and are more well known anyways, just by the nature of them being more public facing, but get the second grade teacher who has made a big impact and, you know, you share a picture out of her. And then all the, you know, the kids that are the parents of the kids that are in her class, or the parents of the kids that had her multiple years ago, you know, they start commenting, Oh, Mrs. B was great for my kid, she was such an influence and worked well with my kids, whatever it may be. So highlighting staff, there is a great option, if you're able to highlighting students as well, you know, Jimmy aced his third grade math test or something like that, you know, they're just thinking of these cool unique ways, even if you don't think it's necessarily huge news, or super newsworthy, just getting more people, faces of real people, real students, real staff, you know, that parent sees it on Facebook, they're gonna like it, engage it, share it, you know, people want to show off their kids. And so the more you can give them that content, the better. And then, you know, again, with sporting events, event photos, you know, your graduation photos, Avi like those are big things. Anytime you're hosting an event or putting on an event for the school, either during the day or after school, those are great to share as well. And one thing that's kind of people might not think about a lot is alumni achievements. So especially like if your high school or even if you just as a school district, but stay connected. I'm sure school districts are trying to always stay connected with alumni and do these things. But try and reach out to them and get them you know, they did something great in college or they started they're like, you know, they're this alumni was named, top 50 business person in Illinois or something like this. I achievements like that. Trying to get people involved, get real people on there that's going to drive that engagement up and really want to get people to share and comments, like whatever it may be. But we also talked about the user generated content with teachers. But you can also encourage parents, family members to share stuff when they're out at, you know, different events, Field Day or graduation, you can be like, hey, tag us in your photos, and we'll share it or we like make a post on Facebook, we'd love to see your kids graduation, Open House pictures or things like that, or graduation photos of cap and gown. And then if they leave that in a comment, you know, comment on that specific post you can share that content out, be like, Hey, are you okay with sharing this to our pages? And even if not, it's still just drives that engagement. People want to again, show off their kids. So the more you can lean on to that the better.

Unknown: 23:46

Absolutely. So this one's kind of came up in my mind as we were talking about some different things and I'm gonna preference it with neither of us are lawyers, we're not giving legal advice. But anything that schools should watch out for in terms of sharing content, or like even with those students or anything like that.

Riley Harden: 24:05

Yeah, so there's definitely I think most schools and most staff members know which kids can and can't be photographed. So that's always one thing to be on the lookout for is making sure those specific kids especially like if you're a social media manager, or your communications teams for school, getting to know those kids in which ones can and can't be photographed. Don't even take pictures of them even if you plan on using the content down the road because you don't want to forget about it and then end up using it or something. You know, anything that you see maybe in a classroom or outside or recess that you know, is not standard or how things should be done or according to protocol or rules or anything like that. Don't take photos of it. You know if kids are being crazy out on the playground or you don't want to promote anything, necessarily, that couldn't get you in trouble. Light on Yeah, yeah. Even if, especially like checking the background of all your photos, you could be taking a picture of us teacher and a student in the classroom. And then there's two kids picking their nose, or

Unknown: 25:23

it's a good one to think of shaking. Hands in the back. But

Riley Harden: 25:28

yeah, so you always have, you know, you're always paying attention to what's in the foreground of a picture. But always double check what's on the back? You know, and I think wording can be big too. Obviously, I think most of us will know not to, you know, use cuss words and all the language that's not acceptable. But you know, the different small phrases that aren't acceptable that you might use personally that aren't like, terrible by any means, but could be offensive to different group of people. Just keep those things in mind when creating content, because going viral is great, but going viral for bad

Unknown: 26:12

reason is not what you want. Yes, especially as a school district,

Riley Harden: 26:16

yes. So just make sure you're always weary of those things. And on the lookout, double check your post. Especially like, you know, spell checking everything. If you're typing on your phone and your phone autocorrect something and, you know, you just want to make sure you're extra careful and double check everything because as much as you can edit a Facebook post and delete things. All it takes is one person to screenshot it. Before you delete it or change it.

Unknown: 26:48

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's great. We covered a lot of things. Any other advice you would have for districts or schools looking to start in social media or or maybe expand their presence?

Riley Harden: 27:04

Yeah, I think, really just the big one is, my best advice that I talked to people is schedule your content, the more that you can automate the process, the better, it saves you time. And that doesn't always mean set it and forget it and never look back. Because you want to respond to comments, you want to be engaging. But the more you can just humanize the school, the the kids have fun with the social media process. I know, you're in school, and it's a real, professional atmosphere. But social media can still be a fun place. You can still have fun with social media, even though you are you traditionally more serious, you know, I have a working I have a government communications background. And that was one thing that I implemented when I was I worked for the state government in in Indiana, and everything was just so polished and corporate and everything had to be so professional. But that's not social media. That's not what people engage with. You want to have fun with social media post things that people actually enjoy. So have fun with it, schedule your content, but you don't have to be super professional, as long as you follow the the kind of things that we just talked about, as well. But it should be if it's something that you're not having fun with, you know, find somebody else to do it, don't let it be a drag. And then if you're not having fun with it, then you stop posting, and then you stop getting engagement. And then eventually, your, your pages kind of just don't have anything. So let it be something fun, and then go from there.

Unknown: 28:49

So I think we've covered a lot of good topics here. If schools or districts don't have the time to do this, you know, maybe once my advice would be interested in working with you how what's the best way to get a hold of you, Riley?

Riley Harden: 29:05

Yeah, so we'd be happy to sit down and talk to any school district, any school that wants to help or even just wants to have a conversation. You know, we do some strategy planning where we get on a call zoom call, and we can talk to you and put together basically a strategy of these are your audiences. These are the type of people that obviously like parents and things and then these are the different types of content you should be sharing how often so if even if it's just a call like that, where you just need some strategy help, we'd be happy to do that. If you want us to help manage your social media say we just don't have time you don't have the ability to we'd be happy to work with you as well. The best way to reach out is sending me an email. Riley at harden digital.com It's R i l e y at Arden H AR d n digital.com. And that'd be The best way to reach out to me just send me an email, say this is what we're doing, or this is what we could use help with. And I'd be happy to just jump on a call and and see from there, what we can do. And so yeah,

Unknown: 30:14

okay. Sounds great, Riley, thanks for joining us today. And hopefully, these tips are helpful for our districts using our program, but also then, hopefully, in the social media aspect as well. So

Riley Harden: 30:28

yeah, thanks for having me.

Unknown: 30:29

Absolutely.

Riley Harden: 30:32

Hopefully, you all enjoyed that interview, I know is great talking with Joel, he's been one of our longest standing clients at value wise, you know, back when it was just me running the show all by myself. They were one of our very first clients. So it was really happy to do that interview with him. And hopefully a lot of the teachers and administrators who watched the interview at their conference, got a lot out of it. But to kind of wrap things up today, if you had any questions about anything that we talked about during that interview, whether you are in the school system setting or a small business owner, whatever it may be, feel free to shoot me an email. My email is Riley at hardened digital.com. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have about any of the topics we discussed or just anything about social media or marketing in general. Always happy to talk and bounce ideas off with people. So that'll do it for this week's episode. Hope you got a lot out of it. And take care until we see you next time on the digital wrap up