Finessing Facebook

The folks over at TrackMaven put together an infographic with some great tips on how a Facebook post can be tweaked to maximize its potential. The full “Nuts and Bolts” post has all the details, but here is an overview.

Word Power

You’re not limited to 140 characters on Facebook. Say what you need to say, confident in the knowledge that posts with 80+ words get twice as much engagement as shorter posts.

Show and Tell

Show and tell was always my favorite day at school and that may be true with Facebook users, since they engage 37 percent more with posts that have images than those that are just text.

Interact After Hours

Be sure to post when users are active…  posts published after work hours get 11 percent more interaction than those published during the workday and 29 percent more than those posted before the workday.

Everybody’s Workin’ for the Weekend

Even though less than 18 percent of posts are published on weekends, weekends have the most engagement, as in Sunday posts receiving 25 percent more likes, shares and comments than Wednesday posts.

Punctuation is Your Pal

Posts that pose questions receive 23% more interaction and those that employ hashtags rack up 60% more interaction. The big winner is the exclamation point! Posts using exclamation points see almost three times as much interaction!

Target Potential New Twitter Followers With This Trick

Do any of your schools run their own separate, official Twitter accounts? What about PTAs and student groups? It’s likely that the people who are interested in the schools and therefore follow those accounts would also be interested in information from the district level. But perhaps they don’t know your account exists.

The trick is that if you take the first step to follow these tweeters, many of them will get that notification and follow you back. It’s a great way to get relevant, interested followers.

Although you could use the Twitter website directly to accomplish this, I’ve come across a freemium tool called Tweepi that helps make the process faster.

Tweepi has a feature called “Follow followers” that allows you to see a list of followers for any given account.

For example, enter one of your schools’ PTA accounts. Tweepi will list all the followers of that PTA, 20 tweeters per page (you can earn the option of listing 40 per page if you send a tweet promoting Tweepi, and up to 200 per page if you purchase their premium package).

What makes this tool more efficient than just using the Twitter website is the fact that you can sort each page by whether or not someone is already following you, and also hide any users you’re already following. Further, you can easily glance at each user’s bio and location to glean whether they are truly a constituent of your district and community.

Built in to the page-by-page list are buttons, so you can easily follow each user without leaving Tweepi. If you pay for the premium package, you also have the ability to add each user to a list. Personally, I opt to go back to the Twitter website to add them to my lists.

I had already been using this method of gaining new followers, but using Tweepi rather than the Twitter website has made the process much more efficient.

Have you come across other tools that help you identify potential followers? What other methods have you used to increase your following?

Giving Your Superintendent a Voice On Social Media

A growing trend across the country is for superintendents to have a presence on social media. Although this scares some, we believe it to be a great way for our superintendent to share and encourage the great things happening in our district every day. However, we didn’t want the public perception to be that he was sitting at his desk checking Facebook all day long. In addition, we didn’t want to divide our audience, where some individuals followed the district and others followed the superintendent. We wanted a consistent message and source for our community.

So we took our superintendent’s personal profile, we added a professional photo and then locked his security down. Now he uses that profile to interact with our school pages and the community. He follows all the schools and comments on the things happening in each building. It gives him the opportunity to be in front of the community but it doesn’t appear as if he is the one running the Facebook page. Here is one example of what he does:

I know different school districts handle their superintendent’s social media presence differently. This is was works best for our superintendent and district. That is the most important piece. Find what works best for your district. I would love to hear success stories on how other school districts handle their superintendent’s social media presence.