A strong social media presence—it’s the newest “must have” in the media world, including student media. While yearbook advisers and staffs may be well-versed in the realm of print, going social may be intimidating. Rock Canyon High School adviser Kristi Rathbun shares her tips for getting started.
As with other aspects of the yearbook, start by building your social media team. Include a social media editor on your editorial board. The editors and adviser should work together to develop policies for content, responses, permissions and, when necessary, takedowns. Once those policies are in place, pick one platform and begin developing your social media presence.
Instagram, with its 600 million active users, is a great place to start. Decide on a tone or look to project, define your audience and decide what you want them to know. Using a business account allows access to analytics so you can tailor your account to your readers.
Attracting more of those readers means posting consistently and interacting with your audience. Applications like HootSuite, Board Commander/Board Booster and Crowdfire let you schedule posts ahead of time so you can stay up and running even in the midst of deadlines.
Develop a calendar plan for each month and consider the following ideas for posts:
- A mission statement for your book or program
- Fun facts about the yearbook
- Comments on news events
- A call to action—order a book, buy an ad, submit vacation photos
- Q&As
- Glimpses behind the scene
- Quick tips
- Stories using photos and video
- Hashtags with regular posts—#motivationmonday, #throwbackthursday, etc.
- Teasers for your book
- Photos and captions
Rock Canyon High School uses their Instagram account to share moments from the year and disseminate information. In August, they featured photos from the solar eclipse. In November, they used the social media network to remind seniors to check their portraits and name spellings.
In addition to pre-planning posts, the social media staff should keep a close eye on the account so they can interact with the audience, post timely responses and adjust content with the readers’ needs in mind.
A few guidelines for interaction:
- Identify 5-10 accounts and post comments regularly—say once a week.
- Reply to all genuine posts and comments.
- “Like” others’ posts.
- Ask the audience to take action—order a book, buy an ad, submit vacation photos.
- Tag people…intentionally.
The more you interact, the wider your audience grows. And once you’ve established yourself on one platform, you can begin adding others. Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Pinterest offer innumerable opportunities to raise your publication’s profile and communicate with your readers. As you expand, continue to schedule regular posts, keeping in mind the peak times for each platform. Analysis shows the peak time for Twitter is 5 p.m., Facebook 1-4 p.m., Pinterest 8-11 p.m. and for Instagram practically anytime other than the 3-4 p.m. timeslot.
With a sense of fun, a bit of creativity and the help of these tips on scheduling, content and interaction, your staff can overcome the intimidation factor and make your yearbook a star on social media.
