Social Media Accounts


Twitter Twitter Lists Accounts Peripherals / Tools
Over time, after seeing the power of Twitter and other social media to connect with and engage people, I felt as "the tech guy" at my school I should grab a school account on several media platforms that are popular - even if I didn't use them much, so that the school doesn't lose those key names for possible future use. You don't want to have to buy an account off someone - for example you want @tdsb to actually be the tdsb, instead of having to lose that to some kid running a parody account and be forced to use @RealTDSB or something like that. Besides it is good for brand consistency: regardless of the social media platform it's the same spelling for the account name or username.

When I started the school's social media strategy I made Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook accounts, and of course various Gmail addresses. Only the Facebook account was the difficult one, since someone had already created an (unofficial) page for my school. Somehow over time this resolved itself!? I guess Facebook realized we were the official representatives? Anyway this was several years ago. At the time I didn't make an Instagram account, but later I decided probably should, just to at least grab the name so that children don't hijack it for something else. Obviously this making of accounts has a limit. I just don't have time to post to every type of account, the audiences are typically different, and some sites are more versatile than others. In light of this issue, I recently have made more use of If This Than That to cross post between platforms, and essentially try to be where the kids are without making more work for me. I haven't yet seen value in new things like musicly and snapshot, though maybe I should squat on those sites to protect our school brand?


Given more time in the future, I would consider making more time to post specifically to our Facebook page - since it has a different audience (a lot more Alumni, but also parents and students). For now I have things set up so that when I tweet it cross posts to the Facebook account. It only does this for tweets I make (not for retweets - an important point given my audience - will come back to this).

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