So you’ve been tasked with running your school’s social media accounts; now what?
First things first: let’s take stock of what is in place already. If you’re starting completely from scratch, happy days! Skip to the good part!
It’s likely that you are inheriting social media accounts that have already been set up and perhaps running for a while. The first thing you need to find out is who has been running them and how. At the moment, I’m going to concentrate on Facebook and Instagram. I will look at other services in later posts.
Facebook/Meta is a funny old beast. To use it, you will need your own personal Facebook account. If you haven’t got one already, please prepare for this to be a wild ride! As is everything these days, Meta is largely controlled by bots and automation. If you put even a toe over the wrong line, you will be sent to social media jail! The system does not like new accounts and really, really doesn’t like new accounts set up on shared systems, such as a school internet connection.
If you can, set your account up at home. If you really can, set your account up at home, add a few of your friends, and start using it a bit. You need to show the AI that you’re not just another spam bot come to infiltrate their system! Whatever you do, do not set the account up on your work email address. Even more importantly, if you have a personal account already, do not set up a separate account for work use.
Why not? I want to keep my work separate from my personal life. Me too; me too. Facebook, however, has very strong opinions on people having multiple accounts and, whilst it may not bite you immediately, you are treading a very thin line towards both of your accounts being annihilated. It knows. You can’t hide. It will find you!
So, a personal account used in a personal way is going to be your best bet for Meta harmony and successful page management.
Next, you need to get the person that set up the page before you to add you in. Now, because of the above, you really need to have at least two people as admins on a page. This covers the scenarios of either of your accounts getting banned or one of you being run over by a bus.
Once you’re an admin on the page, have a look around and familiarise yourself with what’s what. Hopefully, the account has been set up through the Meta Business Suite. If not, don’t worry for now, but we will look at that in another post.
See what kind of posts have gone before: what works well, how comments are going, what generates the most likes, and how often the page has been posting. Now look at how the page feels. Is there a consistent look and feel to posts? Is there any particular branding that’s being used? Do the posts look organised? Is there a specific day they have been posted?
If the page is brand new, these are all questions you can start to ask yourself about your strategy going forward. Do you have the school’s logo file to hand? If not, can you get it? Who is your target audience for your posts, and what types of posts do you think they’d like to see? When are you going to be able to post consistently? What time of day? How many times a week are you aiming to post?
I will cover all of these questions in later posts, but for now, it’s a good idea to start thinking about what will suit you and your school best so that you can start to build your strategy around this. For now, however, you’ve made a good start. Don’t start ploughing in immediately with posts (unless your predecessor has some ready to go). Now is the time to take stock and work out a plan before you dive straight in.