These 6 campaigns are a great way for schools to develop their creative uses of social media.

Some schools use social media to tell their story - but where is the inspiring content?!

Take a look at some of these ideas to develop your inspiring content strategy.

[1] Twitter Poetry

Challenge your pupils to a poetry competition. The only rules? Stick to the 140 character limit!

A haiku would work excellently, due to the 17 syllable constraint. Perhaps you should call it a #Twaiku? (Sorry!)

How about this…

“When you send your first tweet, you will want to repeat…”

No..?

[2] Vine Lessons

Can you teach a whole lesson in 6 seconds? Probably not, but you can explain a theory, or idea.

The 6 second limit will keep the lesson concise and will allow you to be creative. It could be a person speaking, a stop-motion animation, a drawing? There are lots of ways you can teach using Vine.

6 seconds is a lot longer than you think. Maybe start with explaining a haiku in 6 seconds!

[3] Tumblr Book Reviews

Create a Tumblr blog purely for book reviews. The purpose of this is to encourage pupil participation. It is a simple way to develop your community and to publish pupils’ work.

Tumblr is an interest-based channel for building communities. This is why it works so successfully for creating mini-communities within schools.

Need some inspiration? Take a look at these three dedicated book review blogs on Tumblr:

• Teen Book Reviews
• Paperback’d Reviews
• Lazy Book Reviews

Artist: @joannebarby Hashtag or KiK #sketch_daily for a feature! _________________________________ #sketchbook #sketching #drawing #pencil #love #artcollective #artofdrawingg #artistmafia #artisticcommunity #artnerd #worldofpencils #art4you #artfido #artsglobal #artist_for_shoutout #arts_help #art_nerdy #drawsbyli #sketch_daily

A photo posted by A r t A s s i s t a n t (@sketch_daily) on Nov 11, 2014 at 6:22am PST

Managing multiple Twitter accounts has become essential for schools using Twitter. Schools are adopting the approach of offering their community many types of accounts to follow, based on particular aspects of the school.

This can include a dedicated account for sports, drama, music, library, science, computing and many more.

Appearance

First things first… make sure your brand appearance is consistent. Would you allow your prospectus to be designed by Teacher A, and your website designed by Teacher B? No, you would require there to be a high level of brand consistency. You would also want to have control over how the school’s brand appears.

Ensure that your Twitter appearance is consistent and instantly recognisable. This includes the naming (@SHSsports, @SHSlibrary, @SHSenglish etc.) and profile appearance through the profile image, header image, colours, description, location, website, etc.

Publishing

Publishing to multiple Twitter accounts only using the Twitter web app would be a big pain. You would have to log in and out of each of the accounts - not so good for your productivity!

This is why using a service dedicated to managing multiple social accounts is essential - HootSuite or TweetDeck would be your best options.

Monitoring

Do you know what is being tweeted from all of your accounts?

Three things you can do:

• Create a list on Twitter
• Only follow your school’s sub-accounts
• Monitor on HootSuite/TweetDeck

Creating a list will enable you to follow all of your school accounts, whilst also allowing you to link to the feed on other channels. BBC use this approach well: https://twitter.com/BBC/lists

On HootSuite and TweetDeck you can create columns to follow along with your account’s feeds. An easy way for you to quickly visualise what is being tweeted.

How effective are the accounts?

You could look at the basic metrics - tweets, followers, retweets etc. - but this gives minimal indication to how your tweets are being received.

A more insightful metric to use is #SocialScore. This will show you how influential your accounts are.

You can use Social Candy to keep track of your multiple account’s #SocialScore.

Social media can be used more productively, and effectively by using tools to help you. Not only can you save time and resources but you can also create and share more exciting content.

Here are our six favourite tools that we use daily:

Social CandySocial Candy is quick and easy way for you to get your #SocialScore. Simply type in your Twitter username in and hit ‘Candify’ to receive your score out of 100.

The great thing about using Social Candy is that there is no limit to the number of requests you can make. Keep up-to-date with your #SocialScore daily, weekly, monthly etc.

You can also keep track of other Twitter accounts - your sub-accounts (sports, library, science Twitter feed), competitors, similar schools, celebrities, popular accounts.

Take a look at other people’s #SocialScore and think why they may have the score that they do. 

Buffer

Buffer is a tool that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts at once.

The biggest benefit for your school is that you can quickly schedule content. You can set preferred times throughout the day, or allow Buffer to work out the best time to schedule.

Bitly

Bitly is a link-shortening service that allows you to shorten, track and analyse links across social media, email, print, and other online/offline channels.

The service allows to have your own branded, custom links. For example, we use schoolbyt.es and BBC use bbc.in as their custom Bitly links.

Need help setting up your school’s custom Bitly? Email our social team.

Pocket

Pocket allows you to save articles, videos, photos, and much more, for later.

If you see something interesting and what to read it later, just save it on Pocket. This also allows you to build up an archive of great content that you can start sharing a later date.

The only down side? It can be quite addictive saving interesting articles and you can end up giving yourself a little too much late-night reading! 

Evernote

Evernote is a tool designed for notetaking and archiving your life. Notes can be pieces of text, photos, webpages, files and more. The benefit of using Evernote for your social marketing is that you can create and store your content in Evernote.

Create multiple notebooks (collections of notes) called:

• To do
• Doing
• Published

This will help you organise your content. Have a great idea? Create a note with the idea and put it into ‘To do’. You can then come back to it at a later date.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics doesn’t need much of an introduction. Well, hopefully not?!

Not only does it help you understand which social channels drive most traffic, engagement and conversions, but it can also help you create great content.

Take a look at your most popular pages and look at the behaviour on them - bounce rate, avg. time of page, conversions. Does some particular type of content resonate better with people than other? Maybe you should create more of that type of content!

Found any of these tools useful? Share them with your peers and your social community. 

Want to know how to use these tools effectively? Ask our social team, or arrange a training date.

Other school’s favourite tools

Share your favourite tools with us and we will share the most useful tweets below.

In our experience of social media, we have seen a lot of mistakes! Some are minor, some are major. But there are a few mistakes that we see cropping up frequently. Here are the 4 most frequent mistakes we see schools making:

1. Starting a tweet with an @ sign

A mistake that nearly everybody has made on Twitter at some point is beginning a tweet with an @username. The problem with this is that only people who follow yourself and the person you are mentioning will see that tweet.

For example, if you tweet “@intSchools share lots of great school marketing articles. Check some of them out here - blog.interactive-schools.co.uk”, only people who follow you and us would see that tweet. That is because beginning a tweet with @intSchools would be a reply.

What you can do, and you have probably seen people use this, is start your tweet with a full stop. This would share your tweet to the feed of everybody who follows you.

“.@intSchools share lots of great school marketing articles. Check some of them out here - blog.interactive-schools.co.uk”

This would go out to all of your followers.

2. Sharing everything at once

You must have experienced it before: an explosion of posts from somebody you follow. An how often are they interesting? Rarely. Unless it is a thread that offers a debate, do not share everything at once.

Don’t bombard people with tweets, photos, posts, links - think of social as a marathon, not a sprint.

3. Using hashtags unnecessarily

Overuse of hashtag is annoying, and offers no added benefit to the poster. Some people believe using lots of hashtags will mean your post is likely to reach a larger audience, and therefore pick up more interactions and followers.

Two hashtags per post - maximum!

4. Auto-posting to other channels

Each channel your school uses will be for a specific reason. No channel will be used for the exact same reason. That means that each of your posts should be tailored for that channel - each channel has it’s own ‘slang’.

Tailor your content for each specific channel you use. Yes, it takes time. But the rewards will be there for you to see.

Have you fallen foul to any of these mistakes? Don’t be embarrassed! Let us know if you’re going to be any changes to the way you use social.

And remember, we can come and train your school to ensure mistakes are minimised on social media.

We have a belief here at Interactive Schools that the internet allows your school to tell its personal story to the world. Social media plays a big role in your school’s storytelling process but schools are still not practising this effectively.

By harnessing social media to tell your school’s story, you help differentiate yourself and stand out from the noise. And let’s be honest, there is a lot of noise on social media. Don’t add to it.

We’re going to discuss how to use social media to tell these stories, and also how curate your stories. Telling them is easy, but curating them and creating awareness will need work.

Storytelling

Let’s start with how to start telling your story. There are two types of stories that your school will be sharing:

• What’s happening?
• What’s happened?

What’s happening? (Real-time)

The ‘what’s happening?’ stories are all stories that are happening now. They are stories that are told in real-time.

School’s will need to use specific channels to tell stories in real-time:

• Twitter
• Vine
• Instagram

The channels are built for real-time storytelling. The life of content in these channels diminish quickly as they are built on a timeline approach.

What’s happened? (Archive)

The ‘what’s happened?’ stories tell your audience what has happened at the school. This is more of an archive of the opportunities and memories that people have at the school.

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Tumblr
• News (website)

These channels will act as an archive of the greats things that have happened in at the school. This can span from as short as an archive of the week, or many years.

Social media is not going away and we need to be thinking that these channels can hold memories for 50 or more years.

The archive approach will engage with multiple audiences:

• Prospects
• Parents
• Pupils
• Alumnae

For prospects, it is a great insight into what life at the school is really like. It will show all the opportunities on offer should they go to the school.

Current parents will be able to keep up-to-date with what their child is involved in. With current pupils able to view what they, and their friends, have been enjoying.

Alumnae will be using the archive to relive memories. It will be used to engage and interact with past pupils of the school, and to encourage sharing and advocation.

Curating Stories

Sharing these stories are only valuable if people can consume and enjoy them. Curating your stories effectively is just as important as sharing stories. Effective curation will increase your reach and engagement.

Some channels can be used for both telling and curating stories:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• MailChimp (email)
• Website

Your website is key to curating stories as it has the highest reach. Most people will land on your website if they are looking for an introduction to your school. Your website should entice people to explore your stories.

Twitter and Facebook are your social media platforms used to curate and share these stories in the form of links and photos/videos.

MailChimp (or your chosen email platform) is used to send out targeted emails to people. Segment your audience to only send relevant content to them. Although social media is leading to diminishing use of email, it is still an effective means to communicate directly to people.

How does your school use these channels? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter!

Getting your school’s naming correct, and consistent, on all of the social media channels is more important than ever.

With social media names constantly being taken, it is essential to get it right now. This guide will provide you with the rules and limitations that each of the main social media channels impose.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to change your @username multiple times. There is a 15 character limit, which can cause issues for schools with long names.

Often, schools will use an shortened acronym, or abbreviation to identify there school. The benefit of this is that schools can then easily implement naming for their sub-accounts: @SHSdrama, @SHSsports etc.

• Username / URL changes: Unlimited
• Username / URL character limit: 15
• Real name character limit: 20

Facebook

When signing up for a Facebook Page, a custom URL is not automatically assigned (like on Twitter). Instead, the admin of the Page will have to set a custom URL to the Page. Facebook do allow you to change this URL, but only once. So it is important to get it right first time.

• Username / URL changes: Once
• Username / URL character limit: 5-50 characters long
• Real name character limit: 70

YouTube

Again, YouTube will give you a unique URL to start with which will need to be customised. A custom URL cannot be changed - so you really do need to get it right first time.

YouTube requires you to have a Google account, which will also set you up with a Google+ account - it is important that these are linked.

• Username / URL changes: None
• Username / URL character limit: At least 5 characters long
• Real name character limit: 70

Flickr

Flickr requires you to set a custom URL, if you want to optimise it with your brand name. You cannot change this URL.

Flickr also requires you to have a Yahoo! account.

• Screen name changes: Unlimited
• URL changes - None
• Screen name limit - No limit

Google+

Google+ doesn’t allow you to change the URL straight away. The page needs to be at least 30 days old, and have over 200 +1s.

The URL will also contain a + sign at the start. For example, google.com/+exampleschool

• Name changes: Limited to once every 3 months
• URL changes: None
• Username / URL character limit: No limit

Instagram

Instagram allows you to change your username, which is also the URL, as many times as you like.

• Username / URL changes: Unlimited
• Username / URL character limit: At least 5 characters long
• Real name character limit: 30
• Characters: Letters, number and underscores

Vine

Vine requires you to have an account over 30 days old, and to have more than two posts. That will then enable you to choose a unique URL.

• Username / URL changes: None
• Username / URL character limit: 3-32 characters
• Characters: Letters, numbers (hyphens, full-stops, underscores can be used for visual purposes)

Tumblr

Tumblr allows you to change your URL multiple times. This could either be a .tumblr.com sub-domain, or your own custom domain - trips.yourschool.com.

• Username: None
• URL changes: Unlimited
• Username / URL character limit: 32 characters

SoundCloud

SoundCloud allows you to change your username and URL multiple times.

• Username / URL changes: Unlimited
• Username / URL character limit: No limit

Pinterest

With Pinterest, you only get one shot at getting it right. The username will immediately be used as the URL, so it is best to think wisely.

• Username / URL changes: None
• Username / URL character limit: 3-15 characters

The recommendation is to sit down and list out all of the channels (even the channels you are not currently on) and think about naming options.

In a perfect world, you will have one name that will become synonymous with your school online. This doesn’t always happen so sometimes you will need to get creative. The importance here is to be consistent.

When setting up social media, don’t think about it as the next 2-3 years. Think about it as something you will use for the 50 years. Your social media names are becoming just as important as your website domain.

Let us know how you’ve implemented a consistent naming strategy. Or, if you need help, get in touch!

What is SoundCloud?

SoundCloud is an audio platform, which schools can use to share, collaborate and promote audio recordings. Schools use SoundCloud to share recordings of music performances, and podcasts.

What can you do on SoundCloud?

SoundCloud offers the opportunity for your school’s audience to discover the music performed, or created, at the school.

Podcasts are also a very popular type of audio content for schools to upload to SoundCloud.

Who is SoundCloud for?

The main target audience is the current community at the school:

• Parents
• Pupils

Parents can listen to musical performance that they may have missed out on. Pupils can also use SoundCloud for podcasts, debates etc.

SoundCloud is a popular channel for the younger audience. However, this would not be relevant as the sounds shared on SoundCloud will be sent directly to your school’s audience (email, Twitter, website etc.) rather than discovered on the platform.

What to share

SoundCloud is built to share audio clips. Schools should be using to platform to distribute audio recordings of individual music performances, concerts, student radio, pupil/teacher podcasts etc.

Schools can use SoundCloud to share the following:

• Concerts
• Music performances
• Podcasts
• Languages
• Radio

How often to share?

It is unlikely people will regularly follow and refresh your SoundCloud feed. However, they may end up on the channel and will want regular updates.

Your school will be using channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, website, email newsletter etc., to update people on new sounds shared on SoundCloud.

Weekly posts to SoundCloud is ideal for a school, but consistency is key with posts such as podcasts.

How do you use SoundCloud at your school? Are you planning on introducing SoundCloud? Let us know in the comments, or on Twitter.

The first thing that most people doing web analytics will look at is the audience’s behaviour.

• How many people visited your website?
• How long did they stay for?
• Did they like the content?

These insights provide a basic understanding of the website performance, particularly when measured over time. Are the trends consistent or are they changing over time?

When you log into Google Analytics, the first round of data you receive is the ’Audience Overview’. This data provides you with a very basic overview of your site performance, but that is exactly what it is: an overview.

An overview is only useful when the limitations are understood - these limitations, without understanding will only lead to misinformed decision-making.

What do these things mean!?

The true meaning of some terms are often confused, which can cause some data-driven decisions to be based on misunderstood information. Let’s look at each term and what you can dig out from the data.

Sessions

The number of times that the website has been visited in the month. Opened up the website, closed it, then reopened it? That’ll be 2 sessions.

Sessions will always be higher than unique sessions because some people will visit the website more than once in a month.

Users

Okay, so if sessions are the number of times a website is opened, then users is how many ‘people’ have been on your website. If only one person has visited your website in the month but has done so 15 times, then your session will equal 15 and unique sessions 1.

However, some people will use multiple browsers and devices - which means we cannot assume this is a true figure for the number of people visiting the website. Using different browsers/devices will count as separate sessions.

1 session on an iPhone + 1 session on an iPad = 2 users, but could be 1 person.

% New Sessions

You can imagine this as the percentage of visitors that have never experienced your school before.

Often, returning visitors will be parents or internal staff members - these are people with an experience of your school.

New sessions have never visited your website before, which means they need to be ‘sold’ into your school. You need to delight the visitor by matching the experience with their expectation.

Pages / Sessions

Generally speaking, you want this to be as high as possible. Why? Because you want people to have an engaging experience with your website.

You want them to explore as many pages as possible and consume really good content. But do not let it mislead you; a high number of pages could mean that the visitor cannot find what they are looking for.

This is where the overview can begin to give misleading information. This metric is an average of all pages, all sessions, all keywords, all referrers etc. A good web analyst will delve deeper into specific pages and visitors.

Avg. Session Duration

Similar to pages per session, this should be as high as possible - but not too high. You can be mistaking an engaging journey for a confused and lost one.

This is a very good ‘overview’ but it doesn’t beat looking at individual pages. If a page only has one line of content but yet users are spending 2 minutes on it, there is something wrong.

Alternatively, if a page has a video on but people are only spending 10 seconds on it, you can assume they are not watching the video.

Bounce Rate

This is our favourite metric. The reason being that it provides an insight into a user’s behaviour and reaction to your website.

A user ‘bounces’ when they land on a page and then leave instantly without visiting another page. This tells us that a visitor didn’t receive the experience they expected.

Hopefully, this will give you a basic understanding of the overview metrics on Google Analytics. It is such a powerful tool to use, but only when understood correctly.

We could talk for days about Google Analytics and how your school can use it effectively. No, seriously, we do training days just on Google Analytics!

Book a training session!