Facebook's Finer Points

THIS WILL APPEAR IN SCHOOL BOARD MAGAZINE JAN 2012
Facebook’s Finer Points
Using Facebook to connect with your community? Make sure you’ve covered the basics.
By Jennifer Regina

Communication strategies are rapidly evolving and responding to the constant improvements in social media tools. School districts need to adapt and embrace the new marketing and communication tools in order to stay relevant, gain their constituents’ attention and be able to effectively gain attention in today’s high tech world.
If there were any doubt that your school district should be engaging the community via social media, consider these statistics: According to Nielsen State of the Media Report (2011), there are more than 800 million people on Facebook, while social media accounts for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online. Americans spent an estimated 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook this past year, so it is important to gain a part of your community members’ time for your school district.
The first step in developing a comprehensive social media strategy is to decide on the objectives your school district would like to achieve throughout the year. Do you want to use a social media platform to engage, push out information, create dialogue, or educate? Do you want to drive traffic to your district website or use for feedback on upcoming important issues? Twitter and Facebook can be used as additional communication tools in your arsenal to enforce messages, events and news to your community.
Still hesitating? There are many excellent reasons that your district should be using social media as part of your communication strategy. People are already having conversations online about your school. It is important to know what they are saying and be able to respond if there is a negative backlash. Ignoring or pretending that negativity exists will not help your community relationships. Sometimes your own community will help diffuse issues on the social media sites. Crowd sourcing answers will help create dialogue and build trusting relationships. Districts can also use social media to respond to inclement weather conditions, closures and emergencies. Many districts are sending out Tweets for immediate alerts or updates.
Another great use of social media is that is allows you to create a close-knit alumni community that you can rely on for fundraising, support and dialogue. Blogging and YouTube/School Tube can be used to visually tell a story about your district’s accomplishments. Photos and videos offer an emotional connection that resonates on social media sites.

Rules of engagement
There are some basic rules that school districts need to follow to insure a successful social media launch. Foremost, have patience in building your fans and followers as it will grow organically. Make sure that you tell a compelling story as Facebook is a very loud and busy environment. You need to stand out and post content that is value added and engaging. The ultimate goal should be of developing long-term relationships that will lead to excellent two way communication. Districts also need to look to develop online partnerships with local business through Facebook. For example, your local school fundraisers can be cross-promoted on your Facebook partner’s walls as well as your own, leading to viral diffusion of your message. Don’t forget to reach out to radio DJs, local anchors, politicians, celebrities who can also be bearers of your messages and content.

A Facebook Business page
Please make sure that when you create a Facebook page for your district, you are creating a business page and not a personal page. There are many reasons why you need to create a business page. First of all, Facebook could close your page if you are using a personal account for business use. Secondly, a personal page is limited to 5000 friends, while a business page can have unlimited fans. Finally, a business page allows custom tabs, welcome tabs and gives you access to Facebook Insights, which provides weekly page analytics. More about that later.
School districts should have at least a basic Facebook Business page. Each business page is given a vanity URL link to easily communicate the direct link to the page to like. You can use this vanity URL in email blasts and embed your email signature. For example, my vanity URL is www.facebook.com/marketingeverything. I use this link as my email signature and post it on other walls to get new fans. I also share the link with my friends so that they can promote my services. Lastly, I can share this link on flyers or handouts to drive traffic to my Facebook Business Page. A school district could use a URL with the district’s own name in it.
Every Facebook Business Page has an administrator who can make changes and post as the school district. I highly suggest make multiple administrators to ensure that no one person has ultimate control over your page.

Facebook analytics
Facebook Insights provides weekly page analytics that can help page administrators see who is viewing their content, how much engagement is happening and which posts are most viral. The data will help you curate your page and result in a better and more effective use of your social media profiles.
For example, Facebook Insights will tell you the gender, age, and city of residence of viewers who are on your site, as well as their primary language. (The information comes from Facebook users’ own profiles.) You can see the number of “eyeballs” viewing your Facebook page, and tell what time of day people typically view your page. Knowing that people typically read your posts at 8 p.m., not 11 a.m. can help you post fresh information in a timely fashion. You can see which posts are shared most frequently so you know what type of information is important to your Facebook readers. You can also get a sense of how quickly information is disseminated through your page. I frequently use Facebook Insights just to check that clients are hitting the audience they want to reach. I recommend you examine your analytics closely each week.

Your social media policy
Another important consideration is to post a Social Media policy as a tab on your page so that you inform your fans as to what is allowed. You should also train your staff about what can be posted and send home a policy to your students and parents about rules of Facebook engagement. There are many barriers you can create to easily maintain control over your page content. First of all you can set profanity setting to “high” to eliminate any embarrassing posts. Your administrators will also get an immediate email notification when anything is posted (fresh content or comment) to your district’s wall. Anything negative or controversial can be deleted immediately. You will also know who posted the content and can reach out to them to discuss any concerns. Make sure your fans are engaged and don’t be afraid to float questions for feedback. A Facebook LIKE box should be integrated on your website for people to easily find your page. The @ sign with Facebook allows tagging and you can use this in many ways to create engagement. You can tag other partners on your wall with an @ to help promote their content and also ask them as well to tag your district to create live links and direction to your page.
Districts need to reach offline to create effective online partnerships. Cross promote on each other’s Facebook walls. If you do use Twitter, then make sure to connect Twitter to Facebook and have a custom Twitter tab on your profile. Add the district’s vanity Facebook URL to all employees’ email signatures to help drive traffic and also have it added to business cards. Create custom landing pages to offer Welcome Pages and more visually interesting pages. Districts should consider having a superintendent write a blog to educate and inform the community. The blog can also be added directly to the district’s Facebook page to ensure integration. Anytime a new blog post is added, it will automatically be updated to the Facebook page and to your fans’ newsfeed.

There are many app functions that allow districts to further customize their Facebook Pages. For example, one app called Scribd allows districts to upload PDFs, Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents directly to their page. Some schools are using this app to create a library of registration forms available directly on their Facebook Page. The forms can be shared, downloaded or printed.
The option of outsourcing Some additional advice: don’t be afraid to outsource. Companies such as mine are brought it to help setup a social media profile. We also provide training and strategy development. Many districts hire us temporarily to help them get their feet wet and then once the training wheels are off, they use another employee we have trained. There are many consultants who offer such services.
But before you do anything, a school district needs to decide on its objectives for its Facebook page, so you can use social media to integrate and strengthen your overall marketing plan. Tell a compelling story. Social Media provides an exciting opportunity to reach out to your community and engage them in a long term relationship. It is time to “Get Social!”

Jennifer Regina is chief executive officer of The Marketing of Everything, a social network marketing firm, and an adjunct professor of marketing at Rowan University. She can be reached at jenregina@comcast.net.