With more and more schools using Twitter with multiple accounts, there is the worry that your school identity may become fragmented on the channel.

The idea is that schools are wanting to provide a more tailored communication, based on interests and communities. And we’re seeing more and more schools adopting this approach.

This means that people can follow specific accounts of the schools that they are interested in. For example, a parent or pupil may want to follow the sports, arts, boarding house, and trips accounts.

Even if you do not plan on using the account at this time, there is the benefit of reserving your brand names for future purposes.

Take a look at these examples of how schools have multiple sub-accounts:

A Twitter search for Surbiton High School:

https://twitter.com/search?q=surbiton%20high%20school%20&src=typd&mode=users

A Twitter search for Wellington College:

https://twitter.com/search?q=wellington%20college&src=typd&mode=users

Naming

The clearest solution is to ensure your Twitter handles abide by naming conventions. An example could be that you initialise your school name to form your collection of Twitter handles.

Surbiton High School use this method effectively. Their accounts often use the abbreviation of SHS.

NameChk is a very useful tool to determine the availability of username on many social media channels.

Lists

Lists are a great way for schools to organise their followers. A list of official accounts can be created to show all the school’s official Twitter accounts. Simply create a list, and add your accounts as members. You can then link to the feed, or members list, on your website and other social channels.

An example from Bablake School:

https://twitter.com/bablakeschool/bablake-twitter-sites/members

BBC have also used lists very well, as they have hundreds of associated accounts.

https://twitter.com/BBC/lists

Although lists are a great idea and very useful, there is the issue that lists are not well known or highly visible. Lists are hidden behind the ‘More’ button on your profile.

Following

Another option is to only follow your official Twitter accounts. Of course, you should be following them anyway, but they may be lost in a feed of hundreds of other accounts you follow. 

Header Image

Header images can be used to either add it your official accounts, or to add an ‘official badge’ to denote that the account is related to the school.

Tweeting

Yep, this is pretty simple. But it is very effective to retweet and tweet your sub-accounts. This creates awareness as somebody may not be aware of a certain sub-account, but by retweeting or tweeting to that account their visibility increases.

Description

There is the option to add a URL to your Twitter profile but this should be used to link to your school website. You can use your Twitter description to add in the link to your list of official accounts.

How does your school manage, and promote, multiple Twitter accounts? Let us know in the comments.

Does your school require training on social media? Book a social media training day with us!

Pinned tweets offer the ability to pin a tweet to the top of your profile. This means that when somebody visits your profile, a ‘marketing tweet’ can the first and most visible.

This is important because a lot of people will click onto the Twitter link on your website, which links to your profile page. Previously, this would have brought up all of your most recent tweets. This isn’t the most engaging because, possibly, your three most recent tweets may not have been ‘exciting’.

What types of tweets you can pin:

• Next open days
• Latest news article or blog post
• The most engaging tweet of the week

There are also a couple of other types of tweets which are important for you to understand:

• Best tweets
• Filtered tweets

Best tweets

Tweets that receive more engagement appear larger in size. This makes your engaging tweets more visible.

Filtered tweets

Twitter has started to increase the visibility of the different types of media on offer - tweets and photos/videos.

This means that you can filter tweets by those that are just copy, and those that contain photos and videos.  And with Twitter becoming more and more visual, this is only going to become more important.

How to pin your tweets

1. Select the three dots icon to open up the ‘More’ menu.

2. Select ‘Pin to your profile page’

3. Hit ‘Pin’ to pin your tweet

4. Now your tweet has been pinned to your profile. Now take a look at how it appears

5. Your tweet now appears at the top of your profile, and has the ‘PINNED TWEET’ icon/copy

Has your school introduced pinned tweets? How do you use it? Let us know in the comments, or tweet us @intSchools!

Found this blog post useful? Great! It’s just one of the things we will go through when we come and train your school on using social media effectively.

Book a social media training session with us.

There are always lots of exciting stories waiting to be told from the boarding houses at your school. Not only does it provide your current parents and pupils with great content to consume, but it also helps with marketing your school.

People will fall in love with your school when they come to visit because they feel the personality of the school and can see the wide range of opportunities available. Why not provide some of this experience online? Great storytelling through copy, photos, and videos can emotionally engage your audience.

Getting started

Most of your storytelling about your boarding houses will be integrated into your current online communications, through:

• News
• Calendar
• Videos (YouTube / Vimeo)
• Photos (Flickr)
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Email newsletters

Should my boarding house be separate?

If you can create enough quality content, on a regular basis, then yes… do it! It can be beneficial to build your own community, and to localise your content to a specific interest. However, it is dangerous to your school’s brand to create multiple accounts that are then left to become a ghost town.

A dedicated boarding house channel is a great way to voice a house’s personality in an authentic way. If you don’t think your boarding house will be creating enough content on a regular basis, then introduce it into your main school channels.

Twitter, Vine, Instagram, and now Facebook, support the use of hashtags. Tell your boarding house’s story through these channels but use hashtags to categorise, and archive them. This way people can follow along with the hashtags to see the specific content, without the need to create a separate account.

What channels?

Of course, you can (and should) tell your boarding house’s stories on all your social channels. But if you are going to create a dedicated account for your boarding house, then you will need to choose a relevant channel.

Not every channel will be relevant to your boarding house. Channels that promote ‘micro content’ are the ones that will reap most success. Micro content is quick to consume and quick to create. This benefits not just you, but your audience.

To have your own:

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Instagram
• Vine

Only for main school:

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Flickr (create sets)
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest (create boards)
• Google+

The main distinction between the groups are that the first one can provide a much more real time experience - it can show people what’s happening at the school. The second group is more for what has happened at the school.

How to manage the content

Each channel has its own lingo. Twitter is short and sweet copy. Facebook is longer copy with large imagery. Tumblr is fun animated GIFs. Pinterest is imagery. Vine is short video. Instagram is photography. And so on…

The marketing person will be overseeing the social channels to ensure the social strategy is being adhered to. But, ultimately, there needs to be trust involved to allow the staff members to publish and promote the content.

This comes down to training. If your staff members are well trained, inspired, and motivated; then your school will have strong foundations to succeed with social media.

There are lots of stories ready to be told at your school, and there must be a process in place to allow these stories to be told.

Take a look at some of the examples below to get inspiration for your school.

Examples

Boarding Blogs:

• NLCS Jeju - View NLCS Jeju’s boarding blog feeds
• Eagle House - View Eagle House’s boarding blog on Tumblr
• RGSHW - View RGSHW’s boarding blog
• Windlesham - View Windlesham’s boarding blog

Boarding Houses on Twitter:

• Wellington College // Stanley House - @WellyStanley
• Wellington College // Anglesey House - @WellyAnglesey
• Caldicott Prep - @CaldiBoarding
• Felsted // Windsor’s House @WindsorsHouse
• Fettes College // Glencorse House - @Glencorsian

Does your school have a good boarding blog? Tweet us yours @intschools using #BoardingBlog

#OwnTheMoment planner.

Vine is a channel that is under utilised by schools. It is a great tool for schools to use to tell stories, quickly and creatively.

You’ve only got 6 seconds, so make it short and sweet! The most successful Vines are those that are either entertaining or useful.

To help get you started with Vine, here are 6 Vines that you can share over the next 6 weeks.

1. Get your pupils to sell your school
2. Overview of a sports match
3. Ask your pupils to share their favourite books
4. Share some art work
5. Music performance
6. Come up with something creative!

Hopefully, these 6 Vines will give you a great introduction to the social channel.

Share your entries with #SchoolsOnVine.

PS: Need some inspiration? Take a look at 2013’s best branded Vines. Wow.

Throwback Thursday is a weekly trend that is observed on a Thursday, obviously. The popularity of Throwback Thursday has increased recently with celebrities participating.

The idea behind it is that you share old photos, and share memories.

It is most popular on Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram - where hashtags are the slang of those channels.

@HMSG_senior offer an excellent way of using #ThrowbackThursday.

Theweeklyw  #ThrowbackThursday 1947 was a jubilee year at MSG here’s a pic of the celebratory archery competition pic.twitter.com/GDHDmnDWNK

— HMSG (@HMSG_senior)

February 20, 2014

Schools can introduce #ThrowbackThursday into their Twitter strategy, by tweeting photos from the past. This can help engage your current community and also former pupils.

Give it a try and let us know how you use it!

Our #SocialScore has become the go-to metric for schools to understand how well their tweets resonate with people. We want to show how you can use your score to help improve the content that you share.

Here are four ways that you can better your content using #SocialScore:

1. You are communicating to people

It sounds simple, but it is often overlooked. There are people at the end of a screen looking consuming your content. By remembering this, you tailor your content for real people to share.

#SocialScore is designed to show how people share your tweets.

2. Amplify your content

By not limiting yourself to a single social media channel, but also others, will help Increase visibility.

We’re also seeing schools using sub-accounts that are more focussed on specific sides of the school. If your school does have multiple Twitter accounts, then make full use of it.

We find that sub-accounts often have more engagement. This is because the content is tailored, and specific to an interest. If somebody is following the school’s sports account, then they are interested in sports and much more likely to retweet and share the content.

The other school’s accounts should be used to amplify your content and increase the reach. The key is to ensure relevancy - only retweet content that is relevant to the specific account’s audience.

3. Quality over quantity

If you only have time to share good quality content once a week, then tweet once a week. Don’t tweet because you have to; tweet because you have exciting stories to tell.

By tweeting ‘average’ content, you will dilute the experience and lower expectations. Most of the content you share will be hidden behind a link, and so you want your followers to feel confident that the content behind the link will interest them.

4. Tell stories

People relate to stories, and there are so many stories happening at your school. Share these stories because people emotionally connect to stories. And when there is an emotional connection to a piece of content, people are much more likely to share it.

If you want to find out your current #SocialScore, tweet us @intSchools using the hashtag and we will give you your latest score!

Hey, what’s up? I’m sure you have heard all about Facebook’s recent purchase of WhatsApp for $19 billion (£11.4bn). It sounds a little crazy, right?

WhatsApp is a free (for the first year, $0.99 per year after that) messaging service. It is a mobile only service, that replaces the need for SMS. So really, WhatsApp doesn’t make much money, if any at all. Why then would Facebook pay $19 billion for it? That’s $42 for each of the app’s 450 million users. And the cost of running this service isn’t cheap.

The reason Facebook has bought it is primarily for two reasons:

1. It has a huge number of young users
2. It is mobile only

With Facebook’s recent pursue of Snapchat for $3 billion, it is clear that they are trying to own young people’s smartphone usage.

Facebook know that can’t be the number one social utility on people’s smartphones, without the help from other startups. It isn’t like Facebook cannot develop WhatsApp, or Snapchat, or Instagram - they can (and have tried!).

The problem Facebook has is that people, and in particular young people, will always be on the look out for new, cooler ways to socialise with their friends.

Another problem Facebook has is that adults tend to follow young people. Often, teens are often the early adopters, and adults are the late adopters.

This means that there is almost a cycle with social media usage:

1. Young people adopt
2. Adults adopt
3. Young people find something new
4. Adult usage plateaus
5. Overall usage declines

What does this all mean for schools and their marketing?

Simply put, schools need to think similar to Facebook when it comes to their marketing. This means being alert to new social channels, and reacting quickly to trends.

It also means to always look to the future. Facebook has a huge number of users - bigger than any other social media platform, by far. But that doesn’t mean it will always be the case.

Kids move rapidly when it comes to social utilities. That will never change. And we also know that adults will often follow teens when it comes to social channels.

What kids use today, adults will use tomorrow.

Are you using it as part of your schools’ communication strategy? Let us know in the comments. Or tweet us @intSchools.