MANAGING ICT
Dean Blake is in charge of the PR for a federation of
schools in Bristol. Here he discusses the challenges and benefits of embracing social media as a way of promoting your school to the local community
C
OMMUNICATION IS the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing or using some other medium – according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Other medium? It is a fact that Facebook has 800 million users
and counting, while Twitter has around 300 million accounts. Therefore, could social networking play a key
role in the development and expansion of your school “brand” and its communication? Can social networking fit into a school’s PR and marketing strategy – and if so, how and where? There have been documented cases of educational
institutions that have been caught on the wrong side of social networking with negative outcomes, and as a result, many schools may decide not to run the risk of tarnishing their name. However, although our foray into social networking
is at an embryonic stage as a federation, our schools have started to reap the benefits. Verified and supported by data from Google
Analytics, which is software that sits behind our website, there has been a marked increase of traffic through our websites coming from both Facebook and Twitter. For me, using social networking is not about
Schools on social media
creating more work. It is about simply and easily using every possible marketing tool to intrinsically link our marketing and PR strategy to reach the widest possible audience and constantly drip feed positive news stories and important announcements about our schools.
Also, in the era of the Android, BlackBerry and
iPhone, parents can easily be updated on the latest school news and developments without having to visit the school website every day.
Getting started: Facebook
Facebook has created an easy start-up page (see further information). Click on the “Company, organisation or institution” button and away you go. When constructing our federation’s page, we
discovered that Facebook will not let you disable the comment boxes from posts and so we had to accept that anyone who has a Facebook account can post a comment on our site. However, I can see who has posted and if we were
to receive unwanted comments or posts I can delete the post and block that person from commenting or visiting our site in future. Our page is still in its infancy but so far I have had
only one comment and that was from a photographer trying to sell me his services! Try, wherever possible, to keep the page fresh with
regular posts and with updated pictures and news from your school – this can easily be achieved. You could also set competitions on your page to help increase traffic flow and add a Facebook “like” button to your main school website to make regular visitors aware that you have a Facebook page – or even better link to your Facebook page from your website. Policing your site is fairly simple – you can set up
email alerts to notify you when someone has posted something. We have a link to our Facebook page directly off our federation website front page, so it takes me seconds to scan the page to see if we have any notifications pending or whether any comments have been made.
Getting started: Twitter
Twitter is simple and easy to use and a great way to release short, sharp marketing or informative messages to your “followers”. These could include school announcements or news of media coverage. This again is a slow burner for us with at present
86 followers from an account that has been active for only six months. For me there is a fine balance between regular Tweets and overkill. With only 140 characters or fewer per Tweet, I try to keep them informative and interesting.
Protecting your school
One aspect to consider is protecting your social feeds. Have you ever taken the time to type your school name into Facebook? You may be surprised or shocked by the results. The fact of the matter is that your pupils are possibly setting up and engaging with sites linked with your school name. Before embarking and engaging on any media
campaign – be that social media or press – protection of your brand is paramount. How can this be achieved? What measures, if any, do you have in place to support this? To begin with, we go some way to protecting our
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school name and members of staff at our school by including a paragraph, similar to the following, in our home-school agreement: “No student should post images or video footage of academy staff, students, and images of the academy or the academy name on any internet site without prior written consent from the principal or from staff involved.” This may seem a bit heavy handed but it would
allow you the option to ask the student involved to remove any posting that you deemed offensive or inappropriate, that you could not remove or block yourself, and in some instances we have done this. This does protect you from many unwanted postings.
Workload
Many schools considering signing up to social media are worried about workload – is it constantly going to mean more work updating Facebook and Twitter? The simple answer, no it is not. Twitterfeed is a website that you can sign up to
that will automatically scan your school’s website and forward posts to your Facebook and Twitter accounts –in some cases almost instantaneously – thus taking away the need to post information separately. There will be occasions when you will want to post
an item straight to Facebook, pictures for example, which are simple and easily to upload, or Tweet an announcement (VIPs visiting, an important meeting or student achievement), but the bulk of the work can be carried out for you automatically. Another approach we employed to expand our
use of social networking is to add all job vacancies automatically to our social media feeds. So, if you are seeking employment within the federation and if you have a Twitter or Facebook account and follow us, you will receive instant notifications of job vacancies. If you compartmentalise social networking and
the press you will have a limited effect on your marketing PR approach – it is when you have a cohesive communications strategy that you will see the greatest results. Social networking also opens up the federation to
a new audience, a fact confirmed by the followers we have already seen. Another unforeseen bonus is that we are also followed by at least four or five education journalists both locally and nationally. Social networking may not be for every school and
there may be practical reasons why schools abstain, but remember that communicating with your community is about the imparting or exchanging of information by as wide a variety of media as possible.
SecEd
• Dean Blake is director of communications at the Cabot Learning Federation, which is made up of five schools in the Bristol area. Visit
www.cabotlearningfederation.net, follow them on Twitter @cabotfederation or find them on Facebook as “Cabot Learning Federation.
Further information
• Facebook set-up:
www.facebook.com/pages/create.php • Twitter:
http://twitter.com • Twitterfeed:
http://twitterfeed.com/
SecEd • February 9 2012
Order your Sport Relief Fundraising Resource Pack today at
sportrelief.com/schoolspack
SR12/149 Photo: Victoria Dawe. Sport Relief is an initiative of Comic Relief, registered charity 326568 (England/Wales); SC039730 (Scotland).
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