Tools for Scheduling Tweets and Facebook Pages

I happen to love Hoot Suite. I have the application on my Android Device, but I really like how easy it is to set up and then manage for a school. The analytics they offer are also really great and useful tools for figuring out timing of when to post and what kinds of things people are actually reading.

A few other tools like this

Tweet Deck
CoTweet

Read a comparison of the features and you choose.

Let me know if you use something else that you find useful and why?

Celebrations for Schools

Our school's centennial is around the corner and I am investigating new outlets for social media in this celebration. My search of the web has so far found schools using of course facebook pages and websites exclusive for the celebration. I have found some blogs and flickr albums that have been used as record keepers for the events. Are there any interesting things your school has done with social media that you could see incorporating into an anniversary celebration?

Back to things

A intense year of finishing my writing and managing movement from many different systems has prevented me from doing much writing.

Thinking about Privacy

To begin with I decided to talk a little bit about privacy and social media. Too many times we take people's personal privacy for granted because using technology is so easy to do. When we post a picture on facebook of our child, we don't take a moment to think what about the other children in the picture, are the parents ok with it? We don't think about who can see that picture. As a parent, you might be ok with publicizing the picture to the whole world to see, but the other parents might not. Your child might look great, but there might be something mortifying in the background that you just notice. The types of pictures that are posted online differ and the captions or tags that are posted also differ. One parent may decide to tag every child without thinking about the potential of predator who might encounter that picture and then be able to identify kids if they ran into them on the street.
 
What about the naked baby picture that we post online. We want to share a cute bath time photo, but in some cases today it's being argued that is child pornography.

Another complication to this is teachers and staff who post pictures of their students. They are excited to share their "portfolio" in a sense of what's going on in the classroom, but in many cases forget to ask the permission of their students' parents.

While privacy is something that many do not think about when posting pictures, there are also many advantages to the technology. Today we can share more pictures with many more people and keep them apprised of what is going on in real time.

How to invite people to an event?

Here's a quick guide for your invitees to help with getting the word out about an event that you think others might interest other people.

Step 1: You should go to the event page. You can get there by clicking on a link for that event or pressing the events button at the bottom of the page. And then scrolling down until you find the event.

Step 2: On the right side of the page under the picture it click on the link that says "Invite People to Come."

Step 3: Click on Friends you would like to invite.

Step 4 (Optional): Send a personal message about why you are sending them this invitation.

Step 5: Click on Send Invitations.

Back to School

My busiest time of the year is from June until a few weeks after school starts. I spend my summer updating information and trying to get other people to also help me update information. This summer I also spent time thinking about the social networking that we had done over the first part of the year. From January - June, we mainly just played around and tried to figure out how to use it for our school and how people were interacting with it.

This summer I also spent time trying to figure out the best ways to connect and use social networking. I spent time connecting with alumni, parents, grandparents, and other constituents on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. I posed questions on my profile to see answers to questions were are continuing to discuss as we develop our our social media policies and marketing plans. Some of the answers I got left me to follow up for more information.

It's not surprising that some people accepted my friend requests and others did not. I didn't really expect everyone to do so.  But what was surprising was the amount of people who not only accepted, but have begun to message me through these various networks and allowed me to connect with them on a personal level. I am still amazed by the amount of Facebook messages I receive from constituents asking for more information or thanking me for posting something. Yet another way we can connect and transmit the information.

Another big break through this summer was Facebook directly connecting Facebook Fan Pages with Twitter. So as soon as I post something on Facebook it automatically links with my twitter page. And you can link multiple Facebook pages with a single Twitter Account. Then I have twitter post directly to my personal profile on Facebook. If the message doesn't pop up when you get to your facebook fan page to connect directly with Twitter, try going to www.Facebook.com/twitter. You should be able to link Facebook with Twitter. 

We have a school page and an alumni page, but only one Twitter account. Our Alumni director monitors the Alumni page and I monitor our school page, but now I don't have to remember everytime she posts something to update Twitter also. Magically her updates automatically do it on the twitter page and then my profile.

Are you still trying to decide whether or not Twittering and Facebook is really worth it? I am going to suggest you try out HootSuite.  By setting up an account and using their shortening for really long urls or any urls (http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url) then you can get real time stats about how many people are clicking on your links, where they are clicking them from (twitter or facebook), where the person is located, and much more. It's worth signing up for to see how it's doing. I don't use HootSuite to update twitter, I am doing that in Facebook, but I am using the shortener to condense the urls that I post to Facebook.

Did you take the summer off of all of this? Well, now is the time to get back into the swing of things.
Here are a few ideas to get you started on what to post:

• Information about what Alumni are doing? Are their news articles to link to? Or perhaps events or videos? Have your alumni share with you what is going on in their lives that they wouldn't mind sharing with everyone else? 
• I would suggest leaving personal information off of this, there are better places for that.
• Post pictures from Alumni or Parent events and let Alumni and Parents tag themselves.
• I would suggest coming up with a policy about posting pictures online of minors. Make sure you have written consent from any parent allowing you to specifically post pictures on Facebook if you are going to do that. Also remind parents not to post pictures of other students without consent from parents. Most people are OK with it, but it's better to err on the side of caution.  
• Post important event date reminders like Admission Events, Parents Association Events, Back to School Nights, Donor Events, Alumni Events, etc.
  
• Talk about what's going on in your school and current student accomplishments
• Link back to your website!
• Talk about accomplishments of your school or awards your school has received.
• Talk about the accomplishments of your staff and faculty? What's going on in their personal/professional lives that might be interesting to note. For instance is your music teacher performing in a concert that people can go see. Was a teacher recognized for their dedication to something.
• Welcome people back to school.

Those are a few to get started. I would love to hear more about what you are doing to get your year started.

How to Block Applications on Facebook

Having a name that starts with the first letter of the alphabet means that I get all sorts of requests from people because my name appears first on their friends list. In order to solve this problem, I have blocked a number of applications that I just do not want anything to do with.

There will probably be at least one application out there that someone you are friends with has joined, but you don't want anything to do with. There might be many more. My suggestion is to block the application. Here is one way to do this.

1. Search for the application

2. Click on the Applications Tab in the search to make sure you go to the application and not a group for the application.

3. Find your application in the list and then click on the application

4. And then go to Block Application

How to Suggest a Facebook Fan page to Your Friends

I updated this post here

An easy way to get people to become fans of your Facebook fan page is to have people in your organization Suggest it to their friends.

Here's how to do it:

1. Go the Fan Page (you can type the name in the search if you are not an administrator).
2. Go to the top left side of the Screen and Press Suggest to Friends.3. Once you are done with that, a list of your friends will show up and you can select friends to send the message to by clicking on their names. If your friend is already a fan you won't be able to suggest the page to them.
4. Click Send Invitations and then it will appear on the upper right side of the screen under Requests and say Page suggestion.

Get more fans
Have your fans also help your effort and get them to suggest it to their friends. Isn't that how viral marketing is supposed to work.