We are in the midst of a cold and snowy spell here in St. Louis, which has me thinking about “snow days.” For our Facebook page, no single event or post receives more “likes,” “shares,” “comments” or “views” than a day off from school. Naturally, the same is true for Twitter, where our school closing posts garner more “retweets” and “favorites” than any other stories.
Once our community members realize that we post the information quickly on our social media pages, they like or follow us and then continue to receive our updates throughout the year.
As we learn more about our audience, the other most-liked posts are those linking to feature stories on our website, including photos and stories about our students excelling in academics and doing good things in our schools and community.
But this year, one post stood out among the rest for us:
“Congratulations to the Class of 2013 who will graduate at 6 p.m. tonight! Because this is graduation day for students at Ritenour High School, we’d like to see how many Ritenour grads we have on this page. Please comment below with the year you graduated from RHS.”
This simple post (listed below), placed on our Facebook page on a Saturday from my phone, was seen by nearly 20,000 people, had 319 likes and 699 comments – which broke all records for our page of more than 3,200 followers. Also, more than 50 new people “liked” our page in the days following the post.
The information we collected about our alumni is invaluable, and anecdotally it was good to know how large of a percentage of our Facebook audience graduated from our district. It really helped us learn more about those following our district on the social media site. This is something we plan to post every year.
Does anyone else have other ways they built their likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter? Please share them in the comments.
NSPRA: Social School Public Relations 
Totally stealing this idea!
Ditto! Something I began doing a few years ago was scheduling an educational or inspirational quote to post on our district Facebook page every morning. Besides photos (and yes, snow days!), these tend to garner the most likes, shares and comments of all of our Facebook content — even though they don’t relate directly to the district! It’s an easy way to keep the district’s Facebook page on our followers’ news feeds every day.
During our highly-competitive enrollment period, we give a shout-out to each of our 165 schools on Facebook… encouraging our followers to LIKE and SHARE to spread the word about the school’s great program.
During our recent snow day, our Facebook “likes” increased by 30 within just a few hours. But our biggest post to date was the scoreboard from a winning basketball game. Sometimes, it’s the simple things that catch on. Everyone wanted to celebrate the win including grandparents and community members.
I had a little fun with making a meme. Our football team was hosting a state playoff game and our fine arts program was performing opening night of our fall musical – on the same night! So I put together a few photos and some fun text. It was the most shared facebook post and retweeted twitter post we’ve ever had. It also showed we are human and like to have fun. https://twitter.com/GIPublicSchools/status/396295022074540033/photo/1