Independent schools are flocking to social media and with good reason – promises of improved marketing, branding, and engagement at little or no cost is pretty appealing. The problem though is once independent schools create their social media accounts they aren’t sure how to proceed. Below I’ve compiled a list of 21 ways that independent schools can use Twitter. My list is not exhaustive and I encourage everyone to offer at least one additional way to use Twitter in the comments after this post.
- Automatically feed your school’s RSS news feed to your school’s Twitter account using a service like TwitterFeed.
- Post your school’s sports scores and results.
- Tweet photos and descriptions of your new teachers using TwitPic.
- Post your daily lunch menu.
- Tweet school cancellations due to weather.
- Tweet articles from local newspapers that discuss your school.
- Post changes in the daily schedule.
- Tweet a school picture of the day.
- Take a short video of dress rehearsal for a school performance and post using TwitVid to encourage people to attend.
- Tweet quotes from school meetings that are informational or memorable.
- Tweet job openings at your school.
- Tweet upcoming admission, alumni, and scheduled calendar events as reminders.
- Individual teachers can post Questions of the Day for extra-credit.
- Conduct research using Twitter Search.
- Create a PLN (Personal Learning Network) by reaching out to colleagues at other schools through Twitter.
- Create a Twitter List of Alumni.
- Create a Twitter List of Faculty and Staff on Twitter.
- Tweet items from your other social networks.
- Tweet new additions to your library.
- Share educational news and articles germane to your school.
- Follow other teachers, schools, alumni, and people in your community and listen to how they use Twitter.
Thanks for reading and I hope you will offer at least one additional way to use Twitter in the comments below.
photo credit: Nathan Jongewaard
About Brendan Schneider
That is a great list of things NOT to do on Twitter.
14 and 15 I thoroughly agree with but all the others will probably just annoy your followers (if you have any left).
The golden rule would appear to be that Twitter is not so much about 'broadcasting' but more about 'conversation'. Use a twitter account to establish contact with other teachers, other schools and education bodies; build relationships.
I see this article was written over a year ago. I wonder if you've got on with Twitter since that time?
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
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