LEADERSHIP BY EXAMPLE
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Top Twitter tips for your school JUSTIN SMITH, founder, Chameleon Consultancy, gives his #topfivetips to help elevate your school’s use of, and presence on, Twitter
T
witter offers schools an incredibly costeffective way of promoting events, celebrating the amazing things that go on in the classroom, providing useful information and even gathering opinions on all sorts of things that may be of interest to school leaders. Used well, Twitter, like all social media platforms, can be a very useful tool in the school marketing toolbox. Here are my top five tips to help you make the most of Twitter.
1
BE CONSISTENT AND PERSISTENT! Tweeting once in a blue moon is unlikely to engage anyone, or build your audience, so, plan ahead; schedule what you want to promote and use a ‘social media template’ to make life easy for whoever is responsible for social media in school. This simple template is a great aide-memoire, reminding you to keep to the character count and cover the essential aspects of a catchy article – who, what, where, when and why. You’ll have 280 characters as a limit so use them wisely! If you’d like a copy of our template you can use for your school just get in touch.
16
May 2023
2
EXTEND YOUR REACH You may be familiar with the terms ‘handle’ and ‘hashtag’; these are used to bring others into the conversation and ensure your posts find the people you’re looking to reach. Advertise your Twitter handle (mine is @jus_chameleon, for example) and, if you’re referring to someone else in your message, make sure you quote their handle too so that they’re brought into the conversation and your coverage is increased. Including a hashtag gives your tweet context and allows people to easily follow topics that they’re interested in.
3
SHARE SPECIAL MOMENTS AND USE VIDEO It comes as no surprise that the tweets most likely to be shared and liked contain images or video. Our schools are full of memorable human-interest stories and capturing these can create a real buzz. Research from Twitter themselves suggests that tweets containing images or video attract two or three times more views than tweets that rely purely on text only - but don’t forget to obtain the necessary permissions before publishing