Social Media & Schools: Goals & Measurement

So what do you want out of this whole social media thing?  More than likely you have gotten into social media for your campus to share information and keep your families informed of things happening at school.  That is a worthy cause!  More often than not an informed community is a happy community!  Taking a little bit of time to plan some strategy to the use of social media is a wise investment to ensure you are getting out of the tool, time you are putting in.

Stepping into the social media scene at Eagle Ridge, we looking to do the following:

• take advantage of an opportunity to communicate
• provide a window into school/classroom
• tell the Eagle Ridge story

The only goals related to this endeavor were to 1) post regularly and then 2) identify and track types of posts we were sharing.  Truly the measurement part of the goal was a simple frequency count.  I've covered the post types in previous posts, but below is a quick look at what the data (Facebook) said about the 13/14 school year:

What the data told was not earth shaking.  We were pretty sure where we spent a majority of our time social media wise, but it was so valuable to have that baseline down in order to take the next steps we wanted.  We knew that information we were sharing was valuable, but we wanted to be able to tap into the engagement and learning potential that social media has to offer.

Looking into the 14/15 school year, our focus is not to change the percentages we saw from the baseline.  We really felt comfortable with where the bulk of our posts were (information & celebration), but we wanted to increase the counts in the other areas (engagement, learning, C&I).  That means we're out in classrooms more with device in hand catching the learning as it is happening which is where the Eagle Ridge story resides!  We are being bold in sharing articles and blog posts that we feel would be valuable to our community and that we are engaging them in the tool!  We are finding we have to be much more intentional about our use of the tool in order to work towards our goals.  Not such a bad thing, right!?

I've linked the data tracking document here.  All functions are already embedded  so all you have to do is save it as your own and take a look back at your journey to fill in counts.  As I did this last year and this year, it is really enjoyable being able to relive some of the great moments and great work that has been produced by own amazing staff and students!

Let's get the conversation going!  What are some of your goals for your school and social media this year?

Happy posting

B