If you’re a follower of social media trends, you know that the more “authentic” a post sounds, the greater a response it will generate from your audience. “Natural” voices help foster relationships and prevent readers from feeling like you're selling something instead of engaging them in conversation. One of the best ways to unleash your school’s “authentic” and “natural” voice is to encourage your faculty and staff to post about your school on their personal social media profiles.
In fact, having school community members personally post about your school—rather than focusing all efforts through “official” channels—has three very distinct benefits, as Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications at Cheshire Academy Stacy Jagodowski shared with us.
1. Multiple accounts lead to inactivity, while a single (personal) account facilitates use.
First of all, it’s important to understand that this tactic works best coming from a personal account, rather than a school account created for a specific team or class. Stacy warns against putting faculty and staff on class- or team-specific profiles, due to the potential for inactivity once the class or sporting season is over:
“Using athletics as an example, a team only operates for 25% of the whole year, which means a team-specific profile is likely inactive for 75% of the year. If a coach stops tweeting, it doesn’t accurately reflect the school; we’re active year-round.
“On the other hand, using a personal account means they’ll be active year round. To continue with the athletics example, most coaches have two sports. So for half the year, they’ll have material to share and teach about their sports, plus tweets about personal things and other aspects of school life. That means they are more likely to keep the account active regularly.”
2. Personal accounts limit the school’s liability.
All social media activities carry a certain amount of risk. The need for immediacy in online communication invites careless shares or responses that might’ve been avoided, had they been better vetted. But, Stacy says that when faculty and staff use their own accounts, some of that risk is mitigated for the school:
“If a team account posts something unintentionally inappropriate, it’s on the school to own it because we’ve deemed that an official school account. If an individual posts it, it’s still not ideal, but the school doesn’t own it; the individual does and they are therefore accountable for that content.”
Of course, training the school leaders you’ve identified as potential online thought leaders is crucial, so they understand what is and isn’t appropriate on online forums. Such precautions stem from a common sense instinct about public forum etiquette.
Having a written policy detailing acceptable use when discussing school matters, however, will guide your faculty and staff while protecting your school should something go wrong. Keep an eye on what they’re posting—particularly at the start of this initiative—and be ready to help if a tweet or update inadvertently offends or otherwise upsets your school’s online audience.
3. The fewer school-affiliated accounts there are, the easier it is for the audience to find critical information.
As Stacy put it:
“Why make your followers try to track seven different accounts to find what they need? We opted to maintain our official school twitter and our official athletics twitter, and rely on those two accounts to share athletic information. Now sports fans can just follow @CAFightingCats and #goCAcats to get athletics information.”
By training followers to expect important “official” information concerning the school and various programs from official accounts, it leaves the opportunities for an added “personal voice” wide open for teachers to take for themselves.
So encourage faculty and staff to participate in social media conversations! Building relationships online can lead to increased retention and interest back on school grounds. If you're prepared to train and support them, your school's faculty and staff be the authentic voice your social media strategy needs to engage your online audience.
Additional ISM resources:
The Source for Private School News Vol. 14 No. 7 School Spotlight: Cheshire Academy Shares Social Media Secrets
The Source for Division Heads Vol. 9 No. 3 Cyberbaiting: Get Your Social Media Policy in Place
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 35 No. 1 Faculty and Staff Use of Social Media: Sample Policy
