As school PR pros, we understand we can’t cover every good story going on in our districts. The beauty of social media, however, is that everyone is now empowered as a broadcaster, and there are scores of school and district brand ambassadors out there sharing the good stories to their own followers. By tapping into the crowdsourced content created by teachers, PTAs, parents, student groups and alumni, we share their good news to a larger crowd and keep our social media feeds fresh.
When I find crowdsourced content to share, I use a tool called Buffer to queue it to be published at a later time. There are a number of benefits I enjoy by using Buffer:
- Buffer spreads the content out in a more natural pattern so that you don’t bombard your followers with multiple posts in a few minutes.
- It allows you to set your content to be published during optimal viewing times, when most of your followers are online. To find out what those times are, use tools like Tweriod or SocialBro for Twitter, and Insights for Facebook.
- Buffer supports both the native and manual retweets. Retweet with comment doesn’t seem to work, however.
- If you install the Buffer extension for your Firefox or Chrome browser, Buffer will install a button for you to queue up content straight from the Facebook, Twitter and Tweetdeck websites.
I did a one-week experiment of using only Hootsuite for our social media updates, and I quickly realized how I can’t live without Buffer.
Do you use a similar tool to queue and spread out your social media posts? How do you take advantage of crowdsourced content?
NSPRA: Social School Public Relations 
Very good info. Thanks, Delania.