Social4Schools — Social Media Representatives

Social4Schools is the name of School Webmasters social media service line. It includes setting up and managing social media pages for schools and districts, and in the near future, it will include providing school personnel with the tools they need to manage their own social pages should they desire to do so.

As a School Webmasters social media representative, you will manage the social media presence for schools assigned specifically to you, focusing on posting content that tells the school’s unique story and promotes their successes and programs in a way that helps them achieve their communication and marketing goals. As a contractor, much of being a social media representative will involve your own independent processes. You will develop personalized strategies for communicating with clients, organizing your post schedules, and developing content. That said, social media reps should also expect to work closely with the social media director and other social media team members in continued professional development to learn, develop, and apply best practices and to improve communications for our clients.

The world of social media is always evolving, with platforms making updates, adding features, and sometimes making little changes just for the sake of change. For this reason, it’s important for the social media team to be in regular communication with one another. In an effort to make training materials and resources conducive to regular revisions, most of our resources are housed in the Social Media folder on Google Drive (where we can update, add to, or delete as often as needed) vs. directly on the employee Intranet. Our written/video training may become outdated from time to time, but we’ll make every effort to update it with important changes as they arise.

Getting Started

  • Read our most updated version of the School Webmasters Social Media Manual
  • Refer to the appropriate video, located in our team Videos folder, as you run across recommendations to do so in the manual. Videos will be added, revised, or deleted as necessary, so make this folder a regular resource during your time as a social media representative.
  • Review the overview here for social media sales, set-up, and management. Learn about these processes in more detail in the Social Media Manual
  • Refer to the Resources section on this page for quick links to commonly used websites and tools

Social Media Set-Up

When we set up a new social page for a client, we will either do it in order to hand the page(s) off for them to manage or make ourselves the page administrators so we can manage their posts for them (depending on the service they select). Sometimes we are updating existing pages with our graphics and best practice settings, and sometimes we’re setting up new pages from scratch. Regardless of which platform you are updating/setting up for the client, you will follow a few basic steps with regard to communication. Please refer to the Social Media Set-Up section in the training manual for point-by-point instructions on completing each step. You will find additional resources like e-mail templates and social media graphics specs in our team New Client Set-Up folder in the Drive.

  1. Contact the Client and send him/her our Social Media Questionnaire
  2. Order graphics from the graphics department
  3. Follow up with the client to let him/her know you’ve received their questionnaire
  4. Update/set up pages social pages
  5. Contact the client to let them know their pages are ready
    • Depending on the service selected, you will either hand the pages off to the client, providing them with guidelines for effective social media management, or you will settle on a date to begin managing posts for the client.

Social Media Management

When you begin managing a client’s social pages, you’ll get most of your content from their website. Share events, news stories, etc., but you will also want to use the social page(s) to highlight the school’s staff and unique programs. Remember, you are an important part of this school’s public face/voice, so you need to learn everything you can about them and represent them enthusiastically. Your posts will serve to both communicate to enrolled families and market to prospective ones, so you will have to do at least some independent research to be sure you know enough about them to represent them accurately (this is especially true for Marketing Package clients).

Please review the Page Management section of the Social Media Manual for best practices. In addition, we expect the social media team to participate in ongoing professional development including reading/responding to weekly e-mails and attendance at monthly (virtual) team meetings. Social media changes rapidly, and unlike the operating system our own programmers have written to create and make updates to our school websites for our clients, we have no control over the rate or type of change the platforms we work with undergo. Team communication is essential to ensuring we’re staying on top of current social media practices.

Refer to the following videos (also located in the Resources section of this page) for some general page management resources. Additional videos are located in the Videos folder of our team Training and Resources folder: