You already know the advantages of using social media to connect with families and staff, share stories, or build your brand identity. We'll explore the areas where social media for schools can help, hurt, and what to do instead.

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Handling negativity on social media

It’s crucial to deal with your negative comments in a way that shows your community—and your commenters—that you care. Here are some effective tips for keeping your social media profiles positive and productive.

Advocacy marketing 101

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Transcript

Tyler Vawser: Alright. Let's jump in. So a lot of you know about Apptegy, and a lot of you are clients. Some of you may not be.

We started in twenty thirteen as an idea, and we really launched, in twenty fifteen. We've grown really quickly since then. So we are in almost five thousand school districts across the US and in Canada. Many of you are clients, and we're so grateful that you are.

So thank you for being partners with us and for your business.

We send out a SchoolCEO newsletter every couple weeks. The next one comes out tomorrow. If you're not subscribed, encourage you to sign up for this. Barrett's gonna put a link in the chat that you can sign up for it.

It's free. We use our Engage newsletter tool as well, so you can get a sense of what that's like. But this is kind of in between issues of the magazine. We're sharing ideas and thoughts and want to give you a better perspective on how to think about marketing or social media, kind of these bite sized ideas every other week.

Obviously, SchoolCEO has a magazine. We just came out with the new issue, Generations.

If you've gotten that, would you like throw in the chat like magazine received or I love it or I have questions? But this newest issue is all about how do we reach different generations across your school community, right? Of course, we've got parents and we've got students, but we also have retirees and we have expectant parents and we have all these different people and how do we reach them best? That's what this new issue is all about.

Another resource that I want to put in the chat here is Apptegy Guides. We have a lot on school newsletters and Instagram and school communications. And then we also, on the school CO side, have made it really easy to find all of our articles about social media. So after today, if you have questions or you wanna dig deeper or you wanna send me an email and tell me, you know, what about this part of social media, feel free to read these resources and point those things out to me. So these are there for you to share with your teams, to share with your superintendents, to share with new hires to help them get onboarded as quickly as possible.

Alright. Valerie hasn't received her magazine yet, so we'll get her one. Cool.

So cameras on. Use the chat. We're doing a great job at that already. You all get an A plus.

This is our agenda. Part one, part two, part three. We're going to start with how social media is different for you as a school leader than it is for a private sector leader like me. Okay?

And then we're going to talk about what social media does well and where it falls short. Okay?

Alright. So the first question is, what are your objectives with social media? And you can put these in the chat. And we're actually going to answer these live and start writing them down. And then we'll come back to it maybe at the end if there's time. So when you think about your district and your schools, what are you trying to accomplish with social media?

A positive image of the community.

Fantastic. Reach families.

Telling our story. Okay. Wow. This is happening fast. Alright. Let me go ahead. We're gonna try seeing if this works.

You can still see my screen, hopefully. So tell our story.

Engagement. I'm gonna miss some of them here. So let's see. Promote the school.

Positivity. Okay. Cool. What else?

All the good things.

You guys can type faster than me. So what else? Communication. Okay. For Larray, if I pronounced that correctly, when you think about communication, what are you wanting to communicate with social media?

Basically a lot of the stuff that we're seeing posted now in the chat is, you know, the positive communications with parents, letting them know what's happening in our schools, getting parents involved in our school.

Okay.

And just, you know, reaching out to the community and stuff and getting a community involvement. One of the things that our system does is we do participate with, like, the chamber of commerce and our county, and we get, like, funding and stuff for different activities that we do because we do we are very active in the community and working with the community for our school district. And so that's one of the biggest things. And then just, you know, having the website and posting these kind of things so that, you know, we get everybody involved. Not just, you know, parents, students, teachers, and educators. It's it's the community because, basically, we are providing students with education that will prepare them to, you know, be leaders in our community in the future.

Yep. Very good. Thank you so much. For those of you that have already answered, if there's something that's not up here that you think is really important to add, let's go ahead and add that now.

Internet disparities. Okay. Not every guardian has an email address, so trying to hedge all stakeholders. Okay.

Good. Yeah. So, we'll say, like, tech challenges and yeah. Internet disparity is a good way of putting it, if I can spell.

Alright. Well, we'll come back to this. But I think this is really helpful to know as we continue this conversation about what social media does well and what it can struggle with sometimes. Right?

So let's go ahead and click this again. Alright. So these are your answers. Right? And at the end, if there's time, we'll review this.

Okay?

So first, let's talk about how social media is different for you than the rest of the world. So in the private sector, social media is used a lot. And I want to make a really strong point in a moment about how different it is for them than it is for school districts.

First of all, K-12 social media is generally organization driven. So as we talk about this today, we're actually thinking about your district's account, not your superintendent's personal account. Right? And a lot of times what you see is like the most popular social media online is very often not companies or organizations, but individuals.

And that personality driven side of things can really work. And people generally connect better with a person than they do with a business or an organization or a district. Okay, so that's one thing the private sector has going for it that you may not have in your district. Okay, k-12 also focuses mostly on a local audience.

For a lot of social media, it's a global audience.

You also are community based, not affinity based, right? You also have a broad mandate. This is one of the biggest challenges to school marketing is that you don't get to serve just one type of audience, right? You don't get to just serve elementary students or one type of parent.

You have to serve all students that walk through your doors and their families and the community and taxpayers. And this is a real challenge. Right? When we talk about school marketing, we know it's harder for schools than it is for the private sector because you don't just have a handful of people you're trying to reach.

You actually need to reach all types of generations and all types of stakeholders, even though they have very different levels of engagement with your district.

Okay? So in the private sector, we call this an ideal customer profile. You want a very narrow scope so that you can go reach those people and target them with your ads, your social media, your branding. For a school district, you have so many different people you're trying to reach.

And then lastly, and everybody can identify with this, school districts generally don't have a social media budget at all, or if they do, it's pretty limited. Whereas in the private sector, most of their social media ads or most of their social media is actually paid ads, not free content. Nike is actually an amazing example of this. There was about a three or four year stretch where Nike posted no social media other than social media ads.

If you go to their Facebook page, you can actually see there's like a three year gap. If you scroll down far enough where they posted nothing organically, it was only paid ads. That's not an option that most of you have, right? Alright.

So the number one thing I want you to know from this presentation is this idea of starting at the finish line. So I want to show you some of my favorite brands from the private sector and how they think about social media.

So this is fairer. They make amazing watches. They're too expensive for me, but I like to look at them anyway. Maybe my wife will get me one for Christmas.

We'll see. But when I found them, I found them on Instagram and really liked what I saw. So I went to their website. And there's usually a fancy video of a car.

And the first thing that happens is this.

There's a pop up that asks me for my email address. So I found them on social media. I go to their website, and immediately, they're asking me for my email address. Why?

The simple reason is that they know with an email address, they can bring me back to their website over and over again in a way that social media can't. And so a lot of times when we think about social media as an end into itself, that's not how the private sector is using it. Social media is used in the private sector very often as a way of discovery so that they can go get the contact information of their ideal customer so that they are in control of communications from then on.

So let's look at another brand. This is Miles Apparel. If you're a guy and you like athletic apparel and you like great shorts, they have the best shorts in the world. Huge fan of these guys.

So again, this is their Facebook page. If I click on their website, I go here and the first thing that pops up, fifteen percent off if I give them my email address. But they're a little bit sneakier. They don't just want my email address.

After I give them my email address, they ask me this. They want my mobile number too. So I actually have to do two things. I have to give them my email and my mobile number.

So the reason I bring this up is for a school district, for the vast majority of your audience thinking mainly about parents and guardians, you are already starting at the finish line of this.

So you already know your parents' email addresses or phone numbers. And in a lot of cases, you know both of those and then some, including their physical mailing addresses. So where the private sector is trying to use social media to gain phone numbers and email addresses, you already have a lot of that. And that fundamentally changes the way that you should use social media, in my opinion. Okay, so if you already have this contact information, that means your goals for social media are going to look different. It also means that this contact information you already have can be used in some really creative ways that we sometimes forget are a replacement of or in addition to social media.

All right.

Keep going starting at the finish line, that's a really key point. And again, the private sector is different than you. And the biggest difference that you control is that you have that contact information. So let's look at where social media stands tall or what it does well.

So first, creativity, social sharing and then public visibility.

So I'm going to share a different screen here in a moment. But in general, social media really encourages us to be creative, right? When we think about social media or a social media manager, we often think of someone that's very creative or they're kind of on top of trends and they're good at kind of knowing what people are interested in and what's hot in the moment. Right?

Would you agree with that? We've had a social media manager here before. She was really on top of trends in a way that I just don't have time for. Right?

And that was really cool.

And that creativity and especially the visual side of that is very much a feedback loop. Right? The cool part about social media is that there's a quick feedback loop. There's some negatives to that as well.

But you kind of get to see quickly, is this taking off? Are there comments? Are there not? And social media generally, I think Twitter is somewhat the exception to this, but especially Instagram and Facebook are generally very visual.

And visuals tend to be more creative, or they need to be if you're going to stand out. So I'm going to share my screen here and show you some examples of this from Apptegy's side. So, we're based here in Little Rock, Arkansas. Many of you have been here for SchoolCEO conference.

We wanna talk about Little Rock, but we don't just wanna write, you know, Little Rock population two hundred and ten thousand and all these facts. Instead, we really wanted to show it and associate it with our brand. So here's a good example of a creative visual that kind of takes you on a little bit of a tour throughout Little Rock in a fun way.

We also want to highlight our people. I mentioned earlier that our social media is very often used to show our employer brand and our culture. So we actually highlighted vacations that our staff had been on. Okay?

The other one is a SchoolCEO conference promotional video. So some of you have seen this. So this is kind of the making of, and then we show what that's like. Right?

So this is what social media does so well. It's this visual element that draws people in. So I'll talk to you a little bit later about how you can use this to inspire your other pieces of communication. But by and large, social media is going to be the most creative type of communication you have because it's so visual.

Alright. This is a really fun one, actually. We did back to school photos, and we recreated them. So this is a staff member, back to school.

And then today, some others recreating it. So we have lot of fun pictures like this that we can we can share out there. Okay. So alright.

I'll show you some other examples in a moment. But for now, we have this article about how you can create create great photos. Right? And so, the amazing thing is, like, now with our phones, right, we don't necessarily need to have a super long lens to take great photos.

Most smartphones can do that really well. So we have some resources for you here about how to compose a good photo and what the difference between an average photo and a great photo is. For those of you that have videographers or photographers on your team, you're kind of covered. But a lot of you, we know this from our research, are a one person show.

And so you're responsible to write the post, take the photo, and everything else in between. So this can be a helpful resource as you think about how to do that better.

Instagram is, in my opinion, one of the very best platforms right now. One, it's sort of avoided a lot of the controversy of other platforms, and it tends to be pretty multigenerational. In particular, millennials that have abandoned Facebook have still gravitated towards Instagram.

So, this is an article about, how you can use Instagram, how to do that really well. And here's a great photo from Jenks Public Schools in Oklahoma, who's a client. This is such a great way, right, again, of using social media to pull people into the classroom.

And we often say that people that are not advocates of public schools probably haven't been in a public school in a long time.

And so this is a way of sort of bringing them into the classroom without them physically being there.

Alright. Social sharing. I showed this video earlier. The other strength of social media is it's easy, right?

The platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, have made it very easy for someone to click a button and send it to someone else. Right? That's become normal. You share it with a friend.

You repost it. That is one of the best strengths of social media in allowing one person to share their experience with someone else. This can also be a weakness, though. Right?

We'll talk about negativity a little bit later. But when it comes to sharing, it can backfire. But in general, right, good news can be shared faster than in other communication channels. And then Barrett's been cited in this social media post.

So there he is.

Alright. The third thing that social media does really well, and this is the exception, not the rule, but every now and then, you have these viral moments from a public school. I'm going to show you this video here in a second.

Because social media relies on sharing, it has the potential to change public perception, not just locally, but nationally. Right? And so this video that I'm going to show you a few seconds of got millions of views and was really impactful in showing what's happening in classrooms. And the comments are majority very positive. So let's go ahead and do that.

Curious in the chat, if you've seen this before, I'd I'd love for you to mention it.

Oh, the sound's not gonna work. There we go.

At the bottom, you'll see there's over four thousand comments, a hundred thousand likes, and nearly four million people. This is incredible. Right? This is really well done.

Alright. We will watch the whole thing here.

So the interesting thing about that is for a lot of school districts and any social media manager, that's the goal. The challenge with that is one, it rarely happens. And it's not particularly useful if your audience is mainly local. Right? You want your whole local audience to see that, but it doesn't really help you if four million people see it versus the one hundred thousand people that are in your community.

And so if this happens, fantastic. But this should not be the main goal of social media. Right? The main goal of social media, as we'll talk about later, is to get your audience to take action on the things that matter to you the most.

K? But it can have a really positive perception in the public. Alright. So let's do a little bit more discussion.

What's been the best part of your social media strategy? What do you feel is working really well? Oh my goodness. Regan is the photographer at Jenks, and she probably took those photos.

That is super cool. That was unplanned. All right. Lori, go ahead.

Well, I was just going to say on Instagram, we were really hesitant to kind of get into that space because we didn't think our kids would really want us there. And a few years ago we started with about fifteen followers and today we're approaching ten thousand. And it has just happened organically. Like we share every day, we just go through all of our campuses, Instagrams, and we push their stuff out into the story.

And now we are inundated with the campuses sending stuff to us to share. So we have not really had to do anything to ask for content on that platform. It's coming to us organically, and it is building a really good relationship with our students where we didn't think it would. So if you haven't dabbled in Instagram, I encourage you to do so.

Very cool. Man, he just did the same. Ian has a good comment here. Post often. I think frequency of communication is really important regardless of channel, in particular social media. Yep.

Allowing the student run accounts. The newest issue of the magazine, by the way, has a lot about student voice. So if you have students that are currently involved in your communication strategy or it's something you've been thinking about, go to schoolco dot com and look at some of articles around student voice. It's really helpful.

Yeah. Okay. So Curtis has an interesting one. Not overpopulating, but focusing it on student achievement.

Yeah. That's really good. And that's a big part of it too. It's not just how often you post or where you post, but what are you posting and why.

How do you go about managing DMs on Instagram? Yeah, this is a really good question. We'll come back to that. So I think this is one of the problems with social media is the time that it can take to do it well.

And the expectations that people have for responses are actually quite high. So we'll come back to that in a little while. All right. Any other thoughts?

And then we'll go to where social media falls short. All right. So this next section is very much my opinion based on my experience and SchoolCEO's research. So take some of this with a grain of salt.

Right? I think social media has a place to play. I also think it can be overused. And we often forget, going back to that example, if you're starting at the finish line, you already have the majority of your audience's phone numbers and email addresses.

I think too often we think about social media as the goal and not a tool in our whole toolkit. Alright, so let's go ahead and jump in on this part. So where social media falls short or what it fails at. So this comes from SchoolCO's research when we looked at teacher recruitment.

And we asked over one thousand teachers across three hundred districts in the US how they find jobs, how they research them, what is important to them in decision making. If you haven't read this report, it's very helpful, especially as you're about to start getting into retention or recruitment season.

A couple things to look at here. One is that you'll see that the majority said they strongly disagree, meaning they do not look at the social media posts on platforms like Facebook and Instagram of their districts when they're looking at them.

But the more important piece is this quote here. So only about one point four percent of the sample reported learning about their jobs through social media. It's very popular to post jobs in social media. The issue with this is by the time someone's followed you on social media, they're probably connected with you in a couple other ways.

Right? They went to your website. They looked at the jobs. Then they followed you on social media.

So we found that in general, social media is not a great way to discover jobs.

It can be a great way, especially Instagram, to show what it's like to work there and what the culture is like as someone's thinking about the decision making process.

But those are two very different things. It's one thing to say we have an opening. And there's another to say like, here's what it's like to work here. Right? So keep that in mind that social media probably, for most districts, is not going to be the best way to promote new job openings.

Alright.

The other research is not published yet. This is gonna come out in February. But Brittany, who is our senior manager of media and research, shared this with me. And we recently asked parents, more than a thousand parents across the US, how they prefer to receive information.

And this is one of the questions we asked and one of the answers we got back. So we asked parents, how do you prefer to receive essential information, but non emergency related to your school? And almost identical to what we just saw from teachers is only one and a half percent said they prefer to hear about that on the school or district social media. The number one choice was the website, by the way, and then followed by text messages and other communication.

So we'll be publishing that in February. I don't want to give away too much right now.

But this is really interesting, right? Because if you kind of ask someone like, what do you feel like the best way to reach parents or prospective hires are? They're gonna say, well, I think it's social media, right? But the research really doesn't back that up.

Alright, so here are three key ways that I think social media falls short. The first one, you all will understand right away. So negativity, right? We all have keyboard warriors in our districts that it seems like they their full time job is to criticize everything we're doing and what they're hearing and what they're not hearing and the color of the carpet and what time the football game should be.

Right? If you have those people in your district, you're not alone. If you don't have those people in your district, please let us know who you are. That's amazing.

Britney, who I mentioned earlier, one of our more recent podcast episodes talks about great digital experiences, and she actually brings up the platform Nextdoor.

Has anyone ever used Nextdoor? So this is like a social media platform for neighborhoods. So it's really amazing idea that in practice is sort of a train wreck. So Nextdoor, is very often just full of complaints.

And so Brittany tells this story in the episode that her next door was just a mess, like very negative, kind of regretted moving to that neighborhood until she went in person to meet all these people at like a potluck. Right? And totally different experience. People were delightful, super engaging.

Even the people that were leaving negative comments online were suddenly like kind, beautiful humans in person.

And there's actually a term for this, right? The online disinhibition effect. And what it means is that people actually behave worse online. We all know this instinctively because we've seen it.

But it's an actual effect, which is when I don't have to talk to you face to face, and I can just smash keys on a keyboard, I'm less likely to use good judgment. I'm less likely to assume positive intent. And so social media really struggles with this. It's too easy to respond and to react and to do that in a negative way.

So if that's ever been your experience, I don't know, throw an emoji up in the chat. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that you have to overcome in social media, and it's one of the reasons I think you should always go into social media being very cautious, especially if you have a small team that doesn't have the time to respond to some of these negative negative comments.

This is a resource from SchoolCEO, Jen Taylor, covers rise perfect, about how to handle negative comments. Right? Like, when comments go awry, what can you do? I've actually seen some superintendents learn how to handle this beautifully, which is they're like, here's my number.

Call me. And that tends to slow things down and and often get people to be quiet. But this is a great article if this is something that you dealt with or you're dealing with right now. And the reason negative comments are so difficult is not just to read them and feel like you're not appreciated, but because other people are seeing them too.

Right? Social media is social, which means other people are seeing those negative comments, and many of the algorithms in these platforms actually elevate those posts. And so where a post feels like it's getting great engagement, sometimes it's actually because there's a lot of of comments, and those comments can be negative and really spiral out of control.

Yeah. Valerie just said it perfectly. One of the things I hate most about Facebook is the negativity and the community groups that spread that negativity. That's right.

So we'll talk about that a little bit more. But this is a great resource for those of you that are struggling with that on how to handle that and really have a strategy on how to do that. Alright. And there's some reactions to that.

People agree with that. Alright. So one more discussion break here. How do you handle negative comments on social media?

Do you respond to them?

Blocking them is not always an option, right, because of different laws and state regulations. So what's been your general strategy? And someone can raise their hand and speak out, or you can just put it in the chat.

Jen Taylor says they turn off all comments.

Aaron says ignore. Valerie, go ahead.

So a lot of our comments hopefully okay. Everything on my screen just went black there. Sorry about that. All of not all of our negative comments, but people tend to be more positive on our pages. But we do have some of these, community groups. And unfortunately, they're like invite only.

Those are the ones where that negativity spreads.

And I have just kind of taken the idea that when that starts getting, it's called chitchat.

When those start going out of control, that's when we really just start pushing a lot positivity on our message. Because I have found engaging in those platforms just spirals out of control and there's really no point.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's one of the real challenges too, right? It's like, if you're not responding, I think the advice that I'm seeing mostly is like, ignore it.

Like, don't bother with it. The problem is others in your community are still going to be seeing that, right? Emily, it looks like you raised your hand. Go ahead.

Hi there.

So I agree with what Valerie just said. And I would also share I'm part of this, like, PR networking group in New England.

They're just getting up and started and figuring them live out. Anyway, one of the recommendations I had said in a group with them last week, I think, one of their recommendations was relying on, like, your influencers in the community. And so we all have kind of, like, those champions. And so allowing them, you know, whether they're part of the PTG or school committee or school council, like, allowing them to go in and champion the the good words for us.

Yeah. That's awesome. At our very first schoolCEO conference, there was a Michigan school that came, and they told me they don't respond to anything on social media. And I thought, oh, no.

They said, but we don't have to because we have parent advocates that jump in positively and reinforce the messages that we've given them. So if someone says, hey, you never tell us about, you know, these activities, parents will jump in and say, actually, it was in the newsletter last week or, hey, make sure you're signed up here, and we'll make sure that you're getting that communication. So that's the dream, right? The dream is that you have a lot of advocates, and those people will jump in and help kind of fight those battles for you.

Yeah.

So as we move on to the next slide, I think you need to think carefully about not engaging, right? Because it means that you probably sleep better at night, but your community can still see those things. Right? And so we need to think about what's the best way to address that.

The next thing we want to look at here is the negativity of how much time and distraction social media can cause. So one, it requires timely responses. Someone asked about Instagram earlier. Where you can, depending on the size of your team, I think if you have an Instagram account that's focused on enrollment or if it's focused on teacher recruitment, I would encourage you to have very timely responses. And if you can respond to those on your personal phone or your work phone as quickly as possible.

For Facebook, especially in moments where things get really crazy fast, I think that's a really different one. That's where you probably need a policy. Someone mentioned earlier that if it's negative or it uses profanity, there's a board policy and it gets deleted. So having some of those things in place can be really helpful.

But, again, we're reviewing the challenges and the problems of social media. And this is a huge one is that in the private sector, most people expect a response in thirty minutes, right? If my Delta flight is late, and I tweet at them, they're probably going to respond in thirty minutes or less. That's very difficult to do if you're a one person communications director running the whole show.

The second thing is it requires a lot of heavy reputation management, meaning monitoring LinkedIn, monitoring Instagram, seeing what different comments are on your posts, but also just in general on social media. Okay?

You probably don't have time for both of those things. We're going to focus on these two. Social media tends to have us focus too much on the detractors and have us focus too much on the tactics instead of the strategy. Okay?

So in advocacy marketing, there's this idea of you got detractors, neutrals, advocates. Right? Like, if you've ever gotten an email from Apptegy, we're gonna ask you, like, on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience? Right?

We get really great scores, which we love. So you get one of those, please respond. But the way that we look at those is we're looking at people that are detractors, neutrals, advocates. In a lot of companies and a lot of school districts, you start to obsess over the detractors, and you need to address their concerns.

Right?

But the strategy that's most promoted in the private sector is actually taking this middle group of neutrals and helping them become advocates.

And so social media, because it can get so nasty so quickly, tends to pull all of our attention to the squeaky wheel instead of the person that actually likes our district quite a bit, but maybe has some questions, right? So what we want to do is actually take that neutral person and make them an advocate. But that person is unlikely to be very vocal on social media, and so they won't get the attention that the detractor is going to have.

And at our most recent conference, we had a speaker that actually talked about this. There's a term for it called the, spiral of silence. So as things become more controversial, the majority of people who are just kind of living their lives actually go quiet. So instead of becoming loud advocates, they tend to be quieter as things get heated when you need them the most. And so we need to think about how do we activate those people and get information to them in a way that works best for them even though they're unlikely to get loud in the way that we wish that they would.

All right. This next piece of research that we're going to look at comes from this issue of the magazine. We actually have a webinar on that next week. I'll point to that in a moment.

This was research that looked at six hundred communications directors across the US. And on the left, what you see is we asked what takes up most of your day. On the right, we asked what's the most important part of your role. And what you'll see pretty quickly is that these are not lined up, meaning we don't always spend our time the way that we think is best used. Other things come up. Social media and external communications are right at the top on the left, meaning those things take up most of your day.

But the most important things you should be doing strategically is actually building long term strategy. And you'll see social media is very far down on the list. Right? And social media can take a lot of time and you kind of get into what I can call like tactical hell instead of being strategic and thinking long term about how do we build advocates?

How do we recruit the best teachers? How do we increase our student enrollment? And so, again, think about social media. Is it really helping you achieve your objectives or is it mostly taking up the time that you have?

Alright. I lied earlier. We have one more discussion break. So I'm curious, how are you measuring your social media strategy?

A lot of you mentioned your goals earlier around engagement. You mentioned reaching parents. You mentioned reaching community members, the Chamber of Commerce. How do you measure that right now?

Do you have particular metrics that you're using?

Pulling analytics from Meta or Facebook? Good. What Aaron, what metrics are you looking most closely at, or what are the ones that matter to you?

Sorry, our power just went out, but it just got back on. Perfect timing.

But I am definitely just looking at the numbers, I'll just do the overview and like average likes, how many followers we've gained, basic things, but I also leave a lot of room for, and I just sent it to my boss and we just talk about it, I leave a lot of room for comments and like what I've seen from Meta. And you know that could be like, we had a lot of specifically parent engagement this month, we had a lot of employee engagement this month, like things like that that aren't necessarily things I can just pull, but things that I can see like as a human as the social media manager.

Yeah. I think that's really good to include, like, the the anecdotes and your analysis on top of the other analytics. It's really good. A lot of metadata answers here. Good. Engagement, positive sentiment.

So that positive sentiment, that's actually a really good call out. So engagement can be a little bit misleading. We'll look at that in just a moment.

Analytics. Good. In grant reporting. Okay. Very good.

So this is one of the kind of funny stories out there. So this is a true story. I think the photo is so funny. Some editor just looked for, like, lonely person with a phone on stairs.

But, this is a true story that this Instagram star with two million followers went to sell t shirts and couldn't fulfill the minimum required thirty six orders. Okay? So the point here is that you have to be very careful with your metrics in social media. The number of followers you have can be a good sign.

It can also be very misleading. And in this case, right, didn't necessarily mean that she had followers that were gonna take action on what she wanted. And so this is a little bit of a word of caution. We're gonna look at how different metrics can be misused or used appropriately.

So first, followers. A lot of people track followers on social media and how many they have. But the real question is who, right? If your district is in Kansas, and you have one thousand followers from Australia, I have a lot of questions.

One, how did that happen? But two, is that going to help you? Right? So it really matters who is following you.

It also matters if it's someone that's getting other communication from you or if it's someone that ordinarily doesn't get communication from you. So a good example of this is a parent is going to get texts and emails, but it's unlikely that a retiree that's spending most of the day on Nextdoor and Facebook is getting those emails. And so social media might be more meaningful to that person because they get to see the positive moments that they otherwise wouldn't see unless they go to your website.

Next is impressions. So impressions can be a little bit interesting as well because it's very context and platform dependent. So for example, TikTok counts an impression after one second or less. Whereas a lot of other platforms require four or five seconds of viewing before it counts as an impression, right? So you need to know which platform you're on and how you're counting those impressions.

The other thing is reach. So how many individual people are you reaching with this? Again, that's very context dependent. If you're writing a social media post about upcoming pre k registration and you have ten thousand followers, you shouldn't be disappointed that only five people took action or it reached them.

Right? Because the majority of your audience probably isn't signing up for pre k. It's only a very small number of them. And then lastly is engagement.

And I think engagement can kind of cut both ways. You're trying to create engagement, but also engagement can be forced by negativity. And so you might have a post that's doing really well, but it's actually negative sentiment, not positive sentiment. So I think it was Hadley that mentioned positive sentiment.

That's a really important way of helping the engagement make more sense.

Alright.

So as we kind of wrap things up here, we're talking about social media. But as I started this, I said we want to think about social media as one of the tools in our whole communication toolset, not just the only communication toolset. And very often, I see social media as the main way to share positive stories, but it's not necessarily the best way to share positive stories because we already have the contact information for parents and students, both their email, their phone numbers. Okay?

So we want to measure all communication, not just social media, against the actions you want your audience to take in your goal. So some that come to mind are enrollment, recruitment, sign up, and events. So this is where we're not just trying to spread positive news, but we're also getting them to take a specific action as a result of what we're sharing. So you want to ask, who do we want to act on this?

And how do we make that really easy for them?

So as we reflect here, and then we'll do some questions and comments, remember the finish line. So my number one encouragement to you is you have the phone numbers and you have the email addresses of the parents in your community. Use that to your advantage. Don't just limit a positive story to social media.

You can share a positive story through a text message. You can share a positive story on a voice call. If you've been on a webinar before, I always talk about my kid's principal, mister Helmut. He sometimes leaves voice mails and calls to the parents that are just like, hey.

This amazing thing happened at our school today. And I just wanted you all to know, have a great night. That's it. There's no action that needs to be required.

But he's using that voicemail in a really strategic way because he knows that we're more likely to listen to it because that is usually really critical information. And we got really used to hearing messages, you know, from twenty twenty to twenty twenty two. And so he's using voicemails, he's using texts in a variety of ways, which actually means and this kind of to the second point here, when you use communication channels that are typically just for business in a creative way, not only does it get attention, but it helps all the messages that come later, even if they're business related, stand out a bit more.

So you want to get creative both with the visuals, but also with the uniqueness and the variety of the type of content you're going to share across all communication channels.

Okay? And then lastly, where it makes sense, right, really define the audience action and make it clear to them what you want them to do.

So that finish line concept is the main point here. It's like social media is different for you than it is for school districts, primarily because you already have a direct line to your audience. The question is really, are you using that to share the positive news with those people in a way that you know that you're gonna get ahold of them? I read every text message from my district because it's not as crowded as my inbox.

Right? And I often miss social media posts as a parent because I don't log in every day and I don't use Facebook all that much. Right? Social media kind of has an expiration date on a lot of posts.

And so think a lot about how can you share the positive stories, the great moments across all your communication channels, not just social media.

So with that, let's go ahead and pause. I'll stop sharing.

Who gave us about social media objectives. Right? And so when I look through this, a lot of it is about positivity, good things, and stories. And just like the example of my kid's principles, right?

Don't let social media be the only place that you tell those stories, right? Use text messages, use voice calls, use email, use newsletters to do that. And I think that is such a great way of also building your social media following. And like we just talked about, the people that are getting the other communication, if they follow you on social media, will have the correct information, like Lori was saying, to be able to kinda correct it for their peers and not let it only be the district voice that's chiming in.

R Jackson said, How do we keep posts short but informative? This is a really good question.

You want a variety of content, right? If all of your content is very long, or it's only very short, people kind of become, you know, blind to that and they don't always see that and it kind of becomes context dependent. So we have a great episode. Barrett, if you can put it in the chat.

It's with speaker who really helped us understand, Doctor. Carmen Simon, helped us understand how to vary your content so that all of your messages have a better chance of being heard and understood. Okay?

So I would encourage you to listen to that. We'll put that in the chat. I've got it pulled up right here, actually.

Let's see.

Oh, Barrett just beat me to it. So yeah, so that's a great, question. I think it's really important to vary that content. And where you can, you might have to link to another resource and just kind of give them the short version and then say, for those of you that want more information, read this news article or take these things out.

So Valerie asked a good question. Will ThrillTrail allow us to send a picture in a text message to parents? I don't know the answer to that specifically. I know that a lot of districts will put a short link in the text that brings them back to a news article or to a live feed post that has a photo.

And that can be an effective way to do that.

Alright. Yeah, Ian just said that, right? I'll work around to this is to use your news section and link to it. Yeah, beat me to it. Perfect.

Alright. So the other thing I'll add, and those of you that are Apptegy clients, you already know this. Right? Like, social media can take a lot of time to do the posting. With our products, right, you're writing one message. It's going across all your communication channels, including social media. That saves you some time.

And, you know, think about that finish line concept. I think that's a really healthy conversation.

And have a superintendent, which all of you do, you know, getting them to engage with you and thinking more about the importance of your role. So this is, again, based on SchoolCEO's research that we published earlier this year. And it's a good opportunity to think about how you can work better with your superintendent, how your superintendent and the staff can work better with you.

Alright. Thank you, everyone. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. If I don't see you before then, thank you so much, and let us know if you have any questions and if we can help in any way. Thank you.