Please note that this transcript was auto-generated. We apologize for any minor errors in spelling or grammar.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: [00:00:00] All right, it’s two 30. Everyone. Welcome. My name is Julie Shields and I’m the director of college planning education and training for MEFA. And I’d like to welcome you to our webinar this afternoon, social Media for School Counselors, and this is part of our MEFA Institute. Oh, we can switch to the, sorry, I was trying to switch to the next slide.

Uh, part of our MEFA Institute, uh, which is our professional development training for school counselors. So please come back often and, um, visit us to see our upcoming webinars and also those that are recorded and in our website and you can always, uh, receive professional development points for those as well.

Then today if you have questions, please use the question and answer feature. We’ve shut off the chat. So, um, if you have questions, put them in the q and [00:01:00] a and I will bring them up, uh, either during the presentation or at the end with our presenters. And if you’d like a closed captioning, use the live transcript button that you see on your screen if you need to leave the webinar.

You can do so, and, uh, know that we’re gonna be sending you a recording and a link to the slides, uh, probably tomorrow. And then you can have those, and you can share those with others who weren’t able, able to make it. And lastly, I think most of you know MEFA, but I’ll just remind you that MEFA has been around since 1982, and our mission is to help, uh, families plan, save and pay for college.

And along with that, we, uh, work so closely with our school partners, you counselors with colleges, and with college access groups. Um, so we, we want to just be here as a support. To you. Please stay in touch with us. Let us know what you need throughout the year and, um, come back and visit our, our [00:02:00] resources often.

And with that, I’m gonna turn it over to our terrific panel today and, um, first to Lauren Dance, who is the director of Creative at MEFA. And I’ll turn it over to you, Lauren.

Lauren Denz: Thank you Julie. Um, yes, so, hi, I’m Lauren. I’m the director of Creative at MEFA. Um, I’ve been at MEFA since 2014, um, and working in the marketing department in some capacity since 2018.

Um, so currently I do a lot with our content creation. So whether that’s for the websites, our emails, um, I manage all of our social media channels. Um, I help out with our podcast. I do a lot with our video production, um, and just general content management. Um, so that’s kind of my role. I will let Sierra introduce herself as well.

Sierra Archer: Awesome. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Sierra Archer. I’m a college counselor at Salem Academy Charter School in Salem, Massachusetts. I have a background in school counseling. I earned my [00:03:00] Master’s of Education and Education Specialist degree in school counseling from UMass Amherst back in 2022. And I’m super excited to be here today to talk to you about social media, our Instagram page.

So happy to be here.

Lauren Denz: Thank you. And I will let Joy introduce herself as well.

Joy Jordan: Hi there. Thank you all for being here today. My name’s Joy Jordan. I am the community engagement Coordinator for Monomoy Regional School District. We are out on Cape Cod. I’ve been in this role for about seven and a half years.

Prior to that, I was a magazine editor for 15 years. Prior to that I was a marketing director, and many years before that, I had jobs in book publishing and newspaper publishing, as well as other marketing and communications roles. In my position for the school district, I handle both internal and external communications, including all of our social media channels for the district, um, as well as some other community engagement volunteer management activities.

Lauren Denz: Thank you. [00:04:00] So quick overview of what we’re going to cover today. Um, why to participate in social media. Uh, we’ll do a quick overview of MI a’s new social media toolkit. We’ll do a review of the social media platforms and what is the difference between them. Um, I’ll walk you through how you can easily create some of your own content for social media.

Um, you’re going to hear from Sierra and Joy who can share their insights in running social media accounts. Uh, and then lastly, we’ll look at some next steps that you can take after this webinar. So, why participate in social media? Um, here’s just some general high level data, but 90% of Americans use social media.

2.5 hours is the average time spent per day. On average, gen Z millennials have 8.5 social media accounts per user. So social media is big, and as you can see from the chart on the right, it just continues to grow every single year. And then when it comes to the [00:05:00] social media platforms, um, here we’re looking at Gen Alpha and Gen Z because if you are working in a middle school or a high school, those are probably the students that you’re interacting with the most.

Um, so as far as Gen Alpha goes, they tend to use YouTube the most at 93%, followed by TikTok at 85%. So those are very video forward platforms, so very much video, um, engaging content. And then Gen Z Instagram is their top choice, but it’s followed pretty closely by YouTube and then by TikTok. So same idea, very visual driven content.

And then looking at the role of the school counselor. Um, so school counselors are obviously such a huge part of the college planning process and in a really unique position to provide quality information to families. Um, and you guys also really help MEFA spread our message and just let families know about all of our [00:06:00] resources that, all the ways that we can help families too.

Um, so the graph on the right here, we do, uh, we do a ton of webinars. So I looked at the data from our October family webinars, and one of the questions we ask people when they sign up for webinar is, how did you hear about this webinar? Um, and over 50% said they heard about it from the school the student attends.

So that’s more than our website. That’s more than our emails. That’s more than any of the other choices we gave combined. So it really is the school and the counselors that families are going to for any information related to college planning. Um, and social media is a great way to just expand that reach that you guys already have.

It’s pretty easy to implement. There’s already an existing audience because a lot of students and families are already on these platforms anyways. Um, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. You can really make it simple to be posting on a social media account for a school. So I’m gonna quickly show you [00:07:00] guys me a’s social media toolkit.

So one of the things that we’ve heard as we work with counselors is that they’re really looking for just resources that are ready to go, that are turnkey and that they can just use very quickly. So we created a social media toolkit, um, hopefully. Solve for that need. So we have a couple of different graphics that highlight MEFA a’s resources.

So our emails, our webinars, our resource center. Um, we have a pretty detailed timeline on admissions and financial aid. And the way it works is that you can download the graphic copy, the texts that we provide to go with the graphic, and then all you have to do is paste the text into the social media platform.

Add the image in and then just hit publish. Um, and feel free to tag MEFA if you do, uh, utilize this. I’ll actually open this up so you guys can still see this. So this is on MEFA.org, but as you see, if you scroll [00:08:00] down, the images are right here. You just click the button, it will download, it’ll go up here to your download center.

You can just drag it to your desktop. And then here is the text that you can just. Copy and paste into a social media platform. So again, we’ve tried to make it pretty easy.

So then we have a review of the social media platform. So at a high level, just looking at what they offer. Um, Facebook is really where people go to connect with friends and family members. Instagram is very visual, so it’s people sharing a lot of photos and, um, more and more videos these days as well. X, which, uh, was formerly known as Twitter.

Uh, it’s very news driven, so it’s very in the moment of what’s happening. LinkedIn is, uh, very much a B2B platform. So a lot of workplace, a lot of networking, a lot of thought leadership going on there. Um, and then the last two, YouTube and TikTok are, uh, video platforms. YouTube tends to [00:09:00] be more of people actually searching for a specific topic, whereas TikTok tends to be more of people scrolling and just sort of.

Watching what the algorithm will serve them up, although you certainly can search on TikTok too. Um, and MEFA is active on all of these platforms except for TikTok. I did just wanna include it here because especially with, um, teenagers, it is a very popular platform.

Um, so what does MEFA post on social media? So we share a lot of the similar, the same content we have on our website, but optimized for social media platforms. So what does that look like? We have a ton of articles on our website and for social media, we break them down into quick carousels where you can just scroll through a couple images and get the main highlights.

Um, we have a podcast that has episodes come out every other week, so we break those down into short clips that are just like 30 seconds to a minute long. We have events, mostly webinars, and we promote those and try to get people to register through [00:10:00] social media. And then we also have lots of videos on our website that we reformat for social media and do things like add captions to them.

And more and more, we are doing a social first strategy when it comes to videos. So rather than we make a video for our website and then we can reform on it for social media, we’re actually thinking of social media first. And then if it makes sense to put on our website, we’ll reformat it later on on the backend as well.

So going through our platforms, um, Facebook, this is our Facebook page. We post very similar content here as our Instagram, so I won’t spend a ton of time on this. But here’s an example of a Facebook post, and what you can do on Facebook is to, you can, like a post, you can comment, you can share a post, and that could mean either you’re sharing the content to your own Facebook page and getting it out there for any students and families that might follow the page, or you can share it, uh, privately.

So you could send it in an email to someone in a message, in a text [00:11:00] many different ways. Sofa’s Instagram, this is a screenshot of our Instagram account. Here’s an example of one of the posts we have. Instagram is very visual. Um, so you, you’ll see a lot of kind of bright colors, um, trying to be eye catching.

Here’s an example of, um, you know, tasks for students in their fall of senior year, um, similar to Facebook for what you can do with a post. You can, like, you can comment, you can repost it, you can share it, you can save it. Um, one of the fun things about Instagram are reels. Um, this is sort of like Instagram’s answer to TikTok.

They are short, vertical videos that you can create and share on the platform using various creative tools like music and effects. Um, and unlike Instagram stories, reels are permanent and they can be shared with a wider audience through Instagram’s explore page, and they can also be saved or shared with followers.

So here are some examples of what [00:12:00] MEFA tends to post for reels. So we tend to do, um, this is a newer format, but in the moment, interview style videos. We also do some explainer videos, which are fairly easy to make ’cause it tends to be text over a, um, kind of like a generic video in the background with some music playing.

We also do some videos that have, they have one person just looking directly into the camera and speaking about a specific subject. We also have some customer testimonials, so customers will come on and share their experiences with MEFA. Um, and then lastly, clips from interviews that are done on the MEFA podcast.

So I’ll just show you guys an example of one of these videos.

Jonathan Hughes: MEFA. The FAFSA is the main, hopefully you can hear that, determine financial aid eligibility. So people often wanna know. What do I need to put on the fafsa? So today I’m going to be quizzing my colleagues at MEFA and we’re gonna [00:13:00] play yes or no on the fafsa. Let’s go Christina. So does income go on the fafsa?

Yes. The value in your checking and savings account?

Lauren Denz: Yes.

Jonathan Hughes: 5 29 that you have for the student?

Lauren Denz: Yes.

Jonathan Hughes: 5 29 that you have for the student’s. Sibling?

Lauren Denz: No.

Jonathan Hughes: 5 29 that somebody else owns for the student? No. What about, uh, investments like stocks and bonds? Yes. The value in a retirement account? No. Credit card debt? No.

What about your primary home? No. What about secondary real estate? Like a vacation home or rental home? Yes. Child support received? Yes. Any cars or boats? No. No boats, no boats.

Lauren Denz: So that’s just one example of something. Hi everyone. We would post on our Instagram. Um, and then the other thing you can do on Instagram is take advantage of Instagram stories.

So Instagram stories are a feature that [00:14:00] allow you to share photos, video, and text. Um, but the main thing with Instagram stories is they do disappear after 24 hours. They’re separate from your main profile grid and they appear at, um, the top of your Instagram feed. If you ever are on Instagram, you see the, the little circles at the top.

Those are the Instagram stories. Um, stories tend to be more casual and they’re an authentic way to share updates. Some of the things that we have posted on our stories over the past are a repost of content that is already on our main feed. Um, but we will include a link because Instagram on the main feed, it is a little bit difficult to actually put a link in there that people can click on.

It is actually much easier to do that on Instagram stories. So in this example, anyone watching this could click on this register link right here, and then they could register for this webinar right on the Instagram app. We’ll also repost content that is shared by other organizations. So in this case, um, best Buddies.

They had a post go up about an event that we helped [00:15:00] sponsor. Um, so we re-shared that to our story as well. We’ve done some polls, so these are, you can ask a question, provide a couple of answers, and then people can vote in the poll. So this is one, have you ever received a private scholarship? We’ll, also sometimes, um, do a question box.

So in this case, we were asking people to send us in any questions they had about the fafsa, and then we’ll also go ahead and answer those on our stories. So in this case, um, Jonathan from MEFA, he actually spoke the answer in a short video format. We included a link. People wanted to know more, and the question was, when should I get my F-S-A-I-D?

Um, you can also, they do, so stories do expire after 24 hours. But if you have some that you think are really good and you don’t wanna lose that content, you can actually save them to a specific place in your Instagram profile. And then people, if they are actually on your Instagram profile, can view them in the way that you’ve saved them.

Um, so [00:16:00] X, which is formerly known as Twitter, lemme click over and show you it. Um, again, very much like. People aren’t really scrolling very far back on this. I would say it tends to be very, now people wanna know what is happening that moment. Um, and I will say I feel as though this one has seen a decline in users over the past couple of years where every other social media platform seems to be growing.

This one doesn’t quite seem that way. We don’t really see the engagement we used to, but it is still a good place to post content and every, you know, district is different. So perhaps it is a different case where you might work.

What you can do on X is very similar to the other platforms. Share content. Like it, you can reply or comment, you can save it, you can share it with someone, um, in a different format that’s maybe not on the platform. And then LinkedIn is our B2B network. Um, so I would actually recommend that if you’re not [00:17:00] already, that you follow me a’s LinkedIn account, um, even from your own personal LinkedIn account, not necessarily from the school’s account because so much of the content that we publish there is geared towards school counselors, um, administrators, community-based organizations, anyone who has a role like that.

And I will just quickly show you what our page looks like.

Quick description. You can see some of our posts here,

so very, very networking focused. Um, it could be a good place to follow others in the industry as well. An example of a LinkedIn post. Again, similar things that you can do on a post. Um, and in this one, for example, we were showcasing, uh, the handouts that we have on our website for school counselors and including a link.

So you can easily go ahead and download them. And then the last platform I’m gonna look at is YouTube. So YouTube is a video [00:18:00] platform. Um, an example of what you can do, very similar to the others, and you can also subscribe to a YouTube channel as well. We post a lot of different types of videos on our YouTube.

So examples of some of them are all of our webinar recordings for students and families get posted to YouTube. So it’s a great place if you have families that maybe want a deep dive into a topic, because our webinars do have to be, you know, they’re not two minute videos. They do go longer than that. Um, then we also have some walkthrough videos, and these are tutorials on how to use maybe, uh, a specific calculator on our website, or in this example, it’s a specific tool within MEFA Pathway, which is our college and career planning website.

Um, all of our podcast episodes are on our YouTube channel. So, um, I know people sometimes think podcast, oh, audio, but more and more they are becoming video based. Um, and our podcast does have a video component to it, so you can watch any of the episodes on YouTube. Um, all of our [00:19:00] MEFA Institute recordings are on YouTube, so, um, the webinar that you are in right now will be on YouTube by tomorrow.

Um, so feel free to go and explore any past webinars we have on there. And then we also have some just short informational videos that we try to break down information really simply for families. And I will show you guys just a quick example of one of those.

Jonathan Hughes: Do you wish there was a way to get an idea of how much a certain college may cost after your financial aid is awarded? Well, there is. You can find this information by using a net price calculator, and every college is required to have one on their website. Here’s how they work. Visit a college’s website and locate the net price calculator.

It’s probably easiest to find it using the website’s search bar. Or you can check the financial aid webpage for it, and you’ll be asked to enter some basic information about the student and likely the parents, including annual income [00:20:00] assets and the number of family members in the household. Now each college will ask for different information.

Some colleges will ask for the student GPA if they’re going to include merit scholarship information in their estimates. But in any case, the process won’t take more than a few minutes and it’s anonymous. Once you finish, you’ll see the college’s cost, followed by an itemized estimate of your financial aid offer.

A resulting balance that you would owe the college. It’s very important to note that these results are a very rough estimate based on the information you entered.

Lauren Denz: And so it goes on for another 30 seconds or so. But just a quick explainer video for, you know, it, maybe someone doesn’t wanna read a full article, but they are, they would sit down and watch, you know, a 92nd video.

Um, YouTube also allows you to make playlists, which are collections of videos that you can organize by content. You can create a series and they [00:21:00] provide a continuous viewing experience for the users. So what we’ll do is, I mentioned that we have all our webinars on YouTube, um, and they do tend to be a little bit on the longer side.

So for some of our really popular ones, we’ll take that webinar and then we’ll break it down into individual clips that are about. Maybe five minutes or so each. And that way if parents maybe don’t wanna watch the whole webinar, but they have a, they just wanna know about a specific topic within it. So in this case, maybe they just wanna know about, you know, the CSS profile.

They wanna just know about non-custodial parents. It’s an easy way for them to just click on this and just get right to the information they’re looking for. We also have all of our mefa podcast episodes as a playlist, and we also, you can, um, just make your own playlist based on a specific category. So in this case, we took all of our videos that walked students through Mefa Pathway and put them in a playlist.

So if a student ever wants to do a deep dive into mefa Pathway, it’s pretty easy for them to walk through all these videos. Um, and then creating your own content. So I will say when I [00:22:00] first started doing, um, design type of work years ago, I was using Adobe products and they are top of the line. They are great and you can do anything you want in them, but they are, um, they have a very steep learning curve and they, it takes a lot of time.

It is time consuming to build things in there, which is why I was thrilled when I found out about Canva and started using that. Uh, Canva. Even if you don’t think you have any design skills or technical skills, you can still use Canva. It is very intuitive. It is very user-friendly. It makes it so easy to build content for social media.

Um, I walk through it here, but you potentially, what you do is you can choose from a variety of templates broken down by social media platforms. You can search for what type of design you would like, and then once you pick one, you can then customize the text, the colors, the fonts. Canva also allows you to create a brand kit so you can store your logos, your colors, any icons, all in one place.

So it’s really [00:23:00] easy to customize your work in there and make sure it all has the same look and feel to it. So I will walk you guys through actually just a very quick way to create a post. So this is Canva. If you click on the create button up here. There is, there’s many things you can create in Canva.

It doesn’t just have to be social media. I know I’ve, you know, designed birthday invitations in here, but in this case, we’ll click on social media. Um, and it makes it nice because if you’re not exactly sure what the dimension should be for, you know, a graphic on Instagram, you don’t have to know they’ve already it in here and you can just pick what you’re looking for and it’s fit to the right size.

So in this case, we’ll do a Facebook post. So it starts out blank, but as you can see, we’re in the design tab. You can say, you know, describe what you’re looking for. So maybe I’m looking for a modern announcement. And then search results will appear. You pick one you want, [00:24:00] and then from there it’s very easy to customize it.

So you can say, you know, I want a green background instead of blue. And you might say, all right, the announcement is that. School is closed on Monday, and then maybe you, you know, say, well, this is really the important text, this should be bigger. You can go up here, you can change the size, you can delete anything you don’t want, and then you can add in any sort of graphics you want.

So if you come over here to the Elements tab. You can search, you know, we’re gonna search for a school. It’ll give you graphics, photos, videos, anything like that that you can add in. So in this case, maybe we wanna add, you know, a little image of a school. We can just click on it and make it smaller and, you know, there you go.

And you can, of course, you can customize this much more beyond what I just did, but as a quick example, you can do this and then you can come up here, click share, click download. Um, I [00:25:00] find most of the time the settings are just fine the way they come pre-filled from Canva. So you can click download and then it will be saved, and you can just drag it onto your desktop and then do what you want with it.

And another great thing about Canva is that this was for Facebook. If you wanted to post the same thing on Instagram, rather than starting from scratch and recreating it to fit the Instagram size dimensions, you can click resize. Um, you can browse by category, but in this case it’s actually showing up first ’cause I did this recently.

You click Instagram copy and resize, and now it will reformat it to be for Instagram and you can download this as well. And then you’ll have it for all of your social media platforms.

Um, and then when it comes to video editing, cap cut is a website, um, that lets you upload videos and it makes it very easy to do simple editing To them, it’s a drag and [00:26:00] drop, so you’d upload a video, you can drag it over to the timeline. And it’s super easy to then, you know, cut out maybe something you don’t want in the video, add your logo in.

Um, they make it very easy to get captions for a video. They’ll auto generate them for you, which is great because then you don’t have to manually type out the whole thing of what someone said. So I would also really recommend checking out cap cut if you’re looking to expand your video reach. Okay. And now we’re going to hear from some people that work at schools and actually run school social media accounts.

So Joy, I will let you jump in here.

Joy Jordan: Thank you. That was a ton of great information. Lauren, I think, um, you covered just about everything. I did wanna add, just to make sure people knew about Canva. Uh, if you work for a school district, you can get a free education account, which gives you all of the same features and tools as the.

Paid, I think they call it their pro account. Um, you just [00:27:00] need to sign up, you know, with your school email and that sort of thing, but it gives you a bunch of features. So that’s a good, uh, little tip to remember. ’cause most of us don’t have a whole lot of extra money to be spending, so that’s great. Um. I want to just approach social media with the idea of it being a storytelling tool, because I think that’s where so much of its value lies.

Um, and Lauren touched on a lot of the, the specific. Numbers about the people that use social media and how much it is ingrained in our lives. And I think it can really be a nice compliment to the information that you are sending out, either as a school counselor, as a school building, as a school district.

Um, it, it can really help. Navigate some of the challenges that a lot of us face by presenting the values and the things that are happening in your [00:28:00] schools. Um, I do think it’s important from a strategic perspective to not let it be the only means of communication. Like our rule is that. Social media is never the only place that we share information.

We use it to emphasize information that’s shared in other places, but you never wanna rely on it as the only mode of communications. Um. You can see on the screen that’s a collage of, um, like a little less than a week’s worth of Instagram posts. And it’s a mixture. Some of those are actually videos, which of course you can’t tell from the still photo.

Um, some of them are more graphic announcements, which were made in Canva. Um, that was a little, uh, announcement heavy for us. We try to minimize those because they’re just not quite as engaging to our. Families and our students, but we had a lot going on that week. Um, but you’ll see it’s a mix of different approaches and I think that helps keep it [00:29:00] interesting, um, to the people that are consuming this.

I think we can go to the next slide. Um, we, for our district. We are active on Facebook, Instagram threads, LinkedIn. We do have, uh, YouTube as well. Um, we made a decision a few years ago to step away from Twitter for a host of reasons, but um, this is what works for us and similarly to what Lauren mentioned, we generally.

Post very similar content on Facebook and Instagram and threads. LinkedIn is a little bit different. We’ll kind of reserve that for, uh, staff news or awards or, uh, hiring notices. Things that are a little more better suited to LinkedIn. Uh, the rest are kind of wide open with all sorts of, um, slice of life.

Announcements, pictures, videos. We do go a little more video heavy [00:30:00] on Instagram than on Facebook. ’cause we’ve just found that’s what works better. Um, we, I run the district level accounts for all of these. We do have Instagram accounts for both our high school principal and our high school counseling department.

They manage those accounts. I support them sometimes if needed with, you know, ideas or content, but they run those themselves. And we also, like many districts have a bunch of accounts that are, uh, very specific to a school team or a, um, graduation year, that sort of thing. And. Tho those are usually run by students, sometimes by coaches or advisors, but we do share that content as well.

And I know Lauren had talked about, uh, the different mechanisms for sharing whether you shared a stories. Instagram has a repost. I think another valuable part of sharing content, which is [00:31:00] gonna increase your engagement, is making use of the collaborator tool on Instagram in addition to tagging. So when you go to tag.

Uh, another account on Instagram, you can just tag that person or business or organization or school, um, or you can also ask them to be a collaborator. And when you do that. That shows up on their feed, um, as if they had also created that post and it really maximizes your reach. And so think about that when you’re sharing content.

Um, very often if I am sharing something about. Uh, an award that happened at our high school, I will invite both our high school principal and the counseling department to be collaborators on the post. So then you’re kind of tripling your reach at that point ’cause it’s appearing on each one of their feeds.

So I think that’s a helpful way to, uh, really increase engagement and make sure that everyone who might be [00:32:00] interested in this content is getting a chance to see it. Um, I don’t think. It will work on this presentation, but that image on the screen is actually a reel that I do every year, and it’s just a great example of how simple it can be.

I know sometimes it seems really scary when you’re talking about creating content and conceiving content, and I don’t have any video editing skills and all of those worries. This I do at graduation every year, and I just take a video of our superintendent making me. Pronouncement where students can flip their tassels and then they toss their caps.

It’s like a 10 or 15 second video, and I’ve been doing it for the last probably four or five years, and it is always hugely successful. It’s so easy to do. And so it’s a great example of, um, it doesn’t have to be scary. It can be something very brief and easy to create that get, has a lot of impact.[00:33:00]

Um, and again, Lauren talked about this. It’s, it’s photos and videos. It’s, and it’s not only what is engaging to people, but so much of these social media feeds are curated by that company’s algorithm. And in recent years videos, and to some degree, photos are what? Makes that algorithm share your content with other people and be sure that other people are gonna see it.

Um, and again, as I just mentioned in that previous example, it doesn’t always have to be a ton of photos or really complicated, um, video editing project. It can just be a very brief 10 or 15 second video that you’ve taken. A couple of pictures that you happen to snap of something you saw happening in one of the hallways at school.

You know, it, it can be very simple and so I don’t want people to be, uh, afraid of how hard it is to [00:34:00] create this content. Um, you’ll see the, the sample on the screen. There was one of our students at the high school got an award. The organization wanted to present it to him during school in his class, so.

Luckily they let me know ahead of time, so I just popped over, took a couple of pictures, shared those out, and it, it was again, very simple, um, but had a really big impact. And I think the other thing that’s important to remember when we’re doing social media content is that your tone will. Be a little bit different.

And if this is a time where it’s okay to be a little bit more informal, obviously you still wanna be professional and appropriate, but this is a time where you can have a little bit warmer tone. You can use more explanation points, you can throw an emoji in there, things that you might not do in other communications with your school community.

This is a time to, uh, put that little bit of personality into your messaging.[00:35:00]

And these are just some kind of tactical reminders that I think are important to remember. Obviously you wanna be aware of photo permissions. I know every school has sort of a different, um. Process for maintaining that information, but oftentimes it can be quite, uh, serious. And so you do wanna be respectful of that.

So make sure you’re learning about what your school or district uses for that mechanism. And particularly when you’re dealing with high schoolers, even if they’re not officially opted out, you may be in a situation where you’re taking a picture of some students at an event or activity and one of the kids says, no, no, no, I don’t wanna be in pictures.

And it’s, I think it’s totally appropriate to respect that. You know, at that age, there’s a lot that factors into that sort of thing. So I think it’s important to, um, respect that. Um, there’s a couple of accessibility things I wanted to point out because, uh, there are some [00:36:00] guidelines that are changing. Um.

That will impact school districts in different ways depending on how big they are. The, for the bigger school districts and municipalities, they actually have like an April 20, 26 deadline to meet some web accessibility guidelines, and that does extend to social media, so it’s important to be aware of that.

One of those guidelines is to make sure that if you are posting like a thought flyer or a graphic. That just sort of has the words about a meeting that’s coming up or an event that’s happening in the body of your post, recreate that information because screen readers and translation tools will need to be able to access it.

And similarly, any photos that you post on social media should also have alt text added to them. And that’s kind of the descriptive text that tells what’s happening in the photo. And those are both, um, really important and will be, um, increasingly [00:37:00] mandated by, uh, the folks that monitor this stuff, the Office of Civil Rights.

And so it’s just good practice to get into that. Now, um, if you are. Not sure where you can get enough content to share on social media. Just start letting people know that you’re looking for it. You know, if you hear of something that has happened, ask somebody to send you a photo. If you hear about an event that’s coming up, ask if you can come by and take a photo and share it.

And once you get into that pattern. People will start sending it to you unsolicited and it really feeds upon itself and you start getting some really nice stuff to share. Um, the one example I have on the screen now, we have our high school has a food pantry and Stop and shop was making a big donation.

And because I’ve developed these relationships, the director of that program, um, she let me know that they were gonna be there with the big check. And so I was able to get the photo and, um, share it out. And again, that was a really. Nice experience. And you can see at the top of that where it [00:38:00] says Monomoy Schools and two others.

That’s what it looks like when you have folks that have accepted the invite to be a collaborator. So that was our, um, high school and I believe her Best Buddies program were the two collaborators on that. So that’s kind of how it’ll appear. Right. That was a lot. And I talk fast, sorry.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Well, and we do have one question, um, that I’ll just mention and then you can be thinking about it too, Sierra and Lauren.

Um, uh, is there anything you do to modify your media strategies, your social, social media strategies to engage parents and guardians, and especially for families when their first language is not English? So I didn’t know if you had any thoughts or you could even think about it and we can talk about it later, but Yeah.

Okay.

Joy Jordan: Yes. I mean, I’ll touch on that real quickly. One of the things that, um, I do is the accessibility, um, features that I mentioned. I make sure that everything is, um, from a technical standpoint presented in a way that translation [00:39:00] services, um. On the user’s end, most folks have on their browser and can translate.

So, um, I make sure that things are done in a way that it’s easily translatable. If we are doing, uh, like a graphic or flyer in Canva, I will often do it in two or three different languages and share all of those in like a carousel on Instagram, that sort of thing. I also. Make sure I run our website as well, so it’s easy for me to integrate the two, but if it’s a lot of detailed information, I make sure that I include in the social media, post a link out to our website because I know that that is fully translatable by our families and most of our families know how to, um, access those tools.

Great. Thank you.

Lauren Denz: I’ll also just jump in and share that. Um, the social media toolkit I mentioned is actually currently in the process of being translated into Spanish. Um, and we may expand to some other languages as well, so you’ll be able to [00:40:00] share the content of the graphics and the post that goes with them will be in Spanish.

So that’s coming shortly.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Thank you.

Lauren Denz: Thank you. That was great. And um, Sierra, I will let you jump in

Sierra Archer: and speak to your school. Also, just to jump in on that last question, I think Canva as an awesome tool, um, is a great place where if you are translating your own content, there’s a duplicate feature that you can use.

So if you are creating those infographics and you are actively translating to other languages. Rather than recreating multiple times, you can simply duplicate it, um, and translate it right in that program. So it’s a really great tool and I love all the information that we’ve been sharing today on how to create those posts.

I think it’s awesome. Um, I’m going to dive into our Instagram page called Salem Academy and Beyond. Um, and so this is the. Instagram account of the college and career success team at Salem Academy Charter School, and this is an additional account to our main school page. So this is a department specific account [00:41:00] that I help manage, and we primarily use social media as a tool for a couple different reasons.

So. We want to provide insight into what does college and career readiness look like at Salem Academy. We wanna highlight the incredible work that our team is doing on a daily basis. Highlight the work of our students when it comes to college and career readiness. You can see a picture of our team here on my screen.

I’ll go over an example on the next couple slides, but we also use this as a way to celebrate the stories of our alumni students who have graduated beyond Salem Academy, hence the name Salem Academy and Beyond. Um, and really we use social media as a way to just create this sense of community, right?

With our current students, our families, our alumni, and our staff alike. Um, and so when we think about the, why are we using social media? It’s really another means of communication. We’ve talked a little bit about this today. It’s not the only means of communication. Um, things like newsletters, email, phone calls, things like that.

This is just another additional way that we [00:42:00] can share information. Um, and this also serves as an additional space for our college and career readiness information to be accessed by our community. So it’s not the one and only place that we’ll share info, but it’s just another means of accessing this information.

We can go to the next slide. So here is where I wanted to share just a couple example posts. Um, just to give you an idea of what we are sharing on this page. We tend to have a balance of sharing photos and infographics. Canva is really great for making those infographic, um, posts. So we will make, um, on Canva, different infographics focusing on the FAFSA application opening or college decision day, SAT exams coming up, things like that.

Again, creating that access to information for our community. Um, but if you are an educator looking to start a social media account for your school, for your department, you can really use this as a space to get creative with it and have fun with it. We [00:43:00] did a campaign that was a throwback Thursday segment.

Where we involved our staff members at our school every week on Thursday, we would share a different, uh, photo of a staff member from when they graduated college or their college experience. Um, and students really enjoyed that. So this is kind of a space where you can get creative, have fun with it, um, in terms of what type of content you’re posting.

We also host different events in our department throughout the year. So our college counselor, Brendan Douglas, coordinates our annual college fair. So I included a couple like example posts here of what you might do for posts leading up to an event, maybe some infographics of when and where it’s happening.

But also of photos of the actual event to share after the fact. So kind of like a before and after for different events. Um, so this can be great if you are hosting events in your department, in your school, throughout the year to just share information and, um, photos of those events throughout the year.

We will share different information for college visits and field trips [00:44:00] that students go on, and um, also just celebratory moments, right? For that May 1st college decision day we’re posting on our page so you can get really creative with it. And these are a couple examples, but. Um, another big focus of our page specifically is looking to our alumni, which you can see a couple examples here of different alumni updates.

We are super fortunate to have an alumni success coordinator, Bernie Peoples on our team. She is working with our alumni after they graduate, um, and she’s putting together different alumni updates to just celebrate their milestones. What are they doing? What are they up to after graduation? Um, again, it kind of creates that sense of community on our page.

Um, and you can see a couple of those examples here. She also does, um, examples of alumni programming. So Alumni Day, the annual Alumni games, things like that are what are also shared on our page as well. But these are just kind of a couple examples that I wanted to share of what we post.[00:45:00]

So here I wanted to share just a couple social media tips for other educators out there. Um, I have a background in school counseling and so I know for folks, um, you might only have a few minutes of your workday to dedicate to social media. You wanna be intentional. Um, but I wanted to share things that I personally found helpful in this work.

So my first tip is to really find that method of organization that works for you. And this is gonna look different person to person, but the, I have personally found that the tab grouping feature within your browser is super helpful. You can see the college and career success team, little tab group that I have for social media specifically.

If you are like me and you like information kind of at the ready if you’re gonna be working on social media, but you don’t necessarily want a hundred tabs open on your screen all at once, um, this is really useful and it makes it a lot easier to kind of incorporate into your workday. I highly recommend checking it [00:46:00] out.

Um, it’s been really great. The second tip that I have is also kind of looking at digital tools. Um, so finding digital tools that you can use for data collection and kind of automating this process. And again, that will kind of look different for every individual, but if you can find tools that work for you to streamline the posting process and kind of having some data at the ready for content creation, it makes it a little bit easier.

So I included a couple examples here. Um, I mentioned our Throwback Thursday kind of campaign that we did a while ago. And so you can use Google Forms to collect data for your captions, but also Google Forms will allow you in your participants to upload photos right into the form. So if you are wanting to do kind of like a similar campaign or you wanna post on a weekly basis using things and digital tools like Google Forms can be a way to do that.

We talked a little bit earlier about sharing links through Instagram [00:47:00] and Instagram specifically. It’s really tough to share a link right in your caption or right on your post, but something like Link Tree can be really helpful. To have that link right in your bio, on your main profile page. So when you create a post and you want to share information or an article or an RSVP link, something like that, you can say, click the link in our bio and it’ll take you right to, um, that resource.

That’s really helpful. Then also it depends on the platform that you’re using, but scheduling posts in advance, um, particularly through Instagram, can be really helpful. But maybe just looking through some of the functionality of whichever platform you’re using can be a really useful tool. Again, just kind of automating the process a little bit, making it a little bit smoother to incorporate into your workday.

And then my third and final tip is, we’ve talked about this a little bit today, but just making sure you have a system for checking, sharing permissions, so working with your school, your administration, to check what [00:48:00] information, what photos, um, within your community that you’re allowed to share. And it’s always gonna be best practice to get permission, get consent from whomever you’re sharing, whether that be a staff member, a student, family, alumni, et cetera.

So these are some of my top tips that have been really helpful in this process.

And then that is really it for me in terms of Salem Academy and beyond. We share a lot of content that I didn’t necessarily get to talk about or mention today, but if you would like to follow us, um, on our journey, you’re more than welcome to. And I think I’m turning things back over to Lauren.

Lauren Denz: Yes. Thank you guys so much for sharing.

That was great information from both of you. So just to wrap up, looking at next steps. Um, so what can you do next? Um, we’d love it if you followed MEFA across all of our social media platforms. Um, and not just MEFA, but any trusted organization. [00:49:00] So I gave two examples here of Federal Student Aid and then the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

But there are so many out there. Um, I know if there’s like a gear up that you work with or, um. You know, like college board, any accounts like that are great to follow. Um, and the easiest way to stay active on social media is to reshare posts from other organizations. So any of those trusted sources I just named or MEFA, um, if you really feel like you don’t have a ton of time to create your own content, you can share posts from others, and then that’s a way that you still have something going on in your social media accounts, you know, as often as you would like.

Um, feel free to check out our social media toolkit and share any of those resources. And then if you feel ready, uh, get started creating and sharing your own content using Canva, cap cut or whatever tools you’d like. Um, and then lastly, follow other schools in Massachusetts. Follow other school accounts, other school districts, and get some inspiration.

See what they’re doing, see how they get their students involved. You might find some really good ideas. [00:50:00] Um, and then I’ve got links to all of Mefa social media accounts. As well as the social media accounts for Monomoy and for Salem Academy. So these slides will be sent out to you after the presentation, so feel free to go through and check out any of these.

Um, and that that is it. So thank you so much for coming. Um, if you have any questions, please feel free to send them in the chat and that that is it for us.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: I don’t see any questions. And I think that’s because you did, you all did a, an amazing job just sharing so much good information. Um, really, really great.

And I think, um, yeah, I, I’m sure people learned, learned a ton. I’ll give it one. More second to just make sure someone’s not typing. And, but I think, I think we’re gonna be good and, um, I’m glad that your information is all in there so people can go back, reach out to you if they have questions afterwards.

Um, but thank you all so much and thank you to everyone who participated and [00:51:00] I guess have a nice afternoon.

Sierra Archer: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Bye-bye.

Sierra Archer: Bye.