Steve – Facebook?

[Steve Matthews]

I am looking to use facebook more as an information tool to a wider audience than Seesaw.

Is there a training site on how to best set out posts?

[Rob Clarke]

Hi Steve,

What a great question. There is a wealth of information about how to better use Facebook online, plus a plethora of consultants who can help. There is, however, virtually nothing on using social media to effectively engage your community, but we can learn about how to engage your audience from best practices for business.

Some quick thoughts on this issue:

1. Focus on building the website presence so that it becomes the source of useful, thought-provoking information for your community and prospective families. This builds a searchable, SEO-friendly and well-organised body of knowledge around your kura.
2. Use your social presence to promote this body of knowledge. Avoid putting things on your social presence that you’d want parents/community to be able to find later on if it is not on your website. My view is that things get ‘lost in the stream’… hence the suggestion about linking people to the website.
3. Notice when your audience uses your website AND social presence and design how you engage around this. If your site doesn’t have Analytics installed on it, suggest you get this done (we can help if necessary).
4. Then develop and keep a pattern for how you use the two platforms – one as the growing repository of information, the other as the promotional tool.

Re: facebook usage…

• Experiment with ways to engage your community – conduct a poll, ask a question, promote something happening, offer some parenting advice, promote your special character, hold a competition, etc. Here is a reference for further reading, or here…
• Keep posts short and sweet – if you have more to say my view is it should be a blog post on the website, which is promoted via facebook.
• Post stuff that is interesting, useful or educational to your community and tag people into these posts… this builds engagement.
• Install a plugin on your website that automatically posts to facebook (ararira.school.nz is an example of this).
• When planning communications (eg. as you write your newsletter), plan and schedule facebook posts – get your office wonder-woman to schedule them up for you!
• Have more than 2 admins on your facebook page!
• Tell BoT and PTA members to ‘like’, comment and on-share as many posts as possible.
• When someone comments, like their comments or reply to them. Building engagement leads to a wider reach.
• Consider paid facebook promotion in the form of boosting certain posts – eg. open days for enrolment, etc. this is getting more specialised.
• Report on number of ‘likes’ in BoT reports – plus you might also consider other metrics such as commentary on specific comments/ideas/issues.

Let me know if this helps you Steve,

Rob

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