Who Should Be Managing Your School’s Twitter Account?
Unlike a Facebook Page or Group, which can be administered by more than one person, a Twitter account is only associated with a single email address… and in theory, is meant to only be used by a single person.
In the case of a school, business or any other type of organization, however, you may wish to give the job of Tweeting to more that one individual.
As I’ve mentioned several times on SocialMediaSchools.com, the new Internet, Web 2.0, social media or whatever you want to call it, is all about transparency. People want to know who they are doing business with. They want to know whom they are talking to. And they want to know that the businesses, schools and organizations that are a part of their lives are not just big faceless corporations.
For this reason, it is important to establish one of the following methods of managing your Twitter account:
The first way you could run your Twitter account is with a single person in your school’s office managing the account and sending out the Tweets on a daily basis. Somewhere on your Twitter profile or on your school’s website (or preferably both), it is important to tell your Twitter followers who it is that is actually sending out the Tweets for your school or business. If it is the head secretary sending them out, let your followers know! If it is the Principal, let your followers know! The Tweets will become so much more authentic and meaningful if they are coming from a real individual, rather than a faceless person in your office.
Does that make sense? I hope so… because this is extremely important!
The second way you might want to manage your school’s Twitter account is a bit more complicated, as it involves several people within your organization all posting to the same Twitter feed. You might have three people in your head office Tweeting to your profile, or you might have every teacher in your school posting to the account – reporting on the daily, weekly, or monthly activities within their various classrooms.
The advantage of running a Twitter account in this way is that the main office’s workload is drastically reduced. Instead of one person shouldering the responsibility for the account, a group or team of people are now all contributing to the content.
This, of course, can cause some problems as well. With multiple people posting to the account, how do you manage and control the content being released? And if something gets posted that shouldn’t have been, how do you fix that problem? How do you track down the poster and remove the offending Tweet?
Well, here is my suggestion:
Whether you have two people managing your school’s Twitter account or every single staff member in the school posting content to the feed, transparency is important and your Twitter followers want need to know who they are hearing from when they read your Tweets.
To create this transparency, I recommend you create a set of “hashtags”.
Hashtags are words or phrases prefixed with a hash symbol (#) and are used for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets.
In this case, the hashtags you create would be a set of abreviations or initials entered into your Tweets to let your followers know which individuals made which particular tweets.
For example, if my assistant Susan and I were to be managing our Twitter account, we would create a series of hashtags that looked like this: #DA, #SF
Then, when we made a comment to our school’s Twitter account, the Tweet would look something like this:
Volleyball game tonight at the Monte Vista gym. 8PM. See you there! #DA
You’ll note that at the end of the tweet I’ve entered my hastage, indicating that I, Darren Alff, made this particular tweet. If Susan were to post to the school’s Twitter account, her tweet might look something like this:
Congrats to the girls volleyball team on last night’s win. Great game girls! #SF
You see? She’s entered her personal hashtag at the end of the tweet, which lets the school Twitter followers know that it was Susan who made that particular tweet.
Hashtags take a few minutes to set up and organize. And your Twitter users may forget to use them at times, but if you can set up a system of hashtags for those responsible for posting to your Twitter account, the amount of transparency and overall positive feedback you are going to receive will be more than positive.
Note: If you choose to have multiple people managing your Twitter account and you do create a series of hashtags, make sure you post the hashtag information on your organization’s Twitter profile and/or on your official website. Otherwise people won’t know what those initials at the end of each tweet means.
You’ll want to post something like this:
Tweets from (Insert Company/School Name) are made by:
Darren Alff – #DA
Susan Flanders – #SF
See the example below where I’ve places this information in the background of the school’s Twitter profile.
So, those are my suggestions. You either have a single person manage your Twitter account, or you assign a group of people to make the tweets.
Whatever method you choose to use however, you need to let your followers know exactly who it is that is making the tweets.
You can choose to ignore my advice, of course, but I honestly believe that this transparency will help to make your Twitter campaign a huge success… and your customers, parents, teachers, students and community members will appreciate your honesty.
Click here to go to the next Twitter Module.
Send all questions to contact@socialmediaschools.com and we will respond within 24 hours!
