The Two Best Twitter Campaigns for Schools

Does it get any cuter than this! 

Think about this... What two days of school have the most energy, excitement and camera-ready smiles? The first day, and the last day/graduation. One more question. What two days have the most cameras snapping and social media postings? That's right, the first day and graduation. So, why not capitalize on all of this excitement and energy and share it with your entire community. Create Twitter campaigns for these two exciting days on campus.

At Arcadia Unified School District, where I have the privilege of being the Public Information Officer, we created the social media campaign #ArcadiaFirstDay. It's been amazing to see all of the adorable posts, that we can then Retweet and share with all of our followers, from so many proud parents. It's a positive content creation machine, and your school is mentioned in every post.

Siblings in every class at Arcadia High
This was tweeted by a news producer and was featured on ABC7!

A few things to keep in mind:
1. The hashtag #ArcadiaFirstDay can be used year after year and continue to grow. There is no year on it for that purpose. As the years go by, you will see more and more people using it as it quickly spreads. Don't be disappointed if the first year is not overwhelming, it will grow.

2. Select your hashtag carefully. Before selecting a hashtag, make sure it can be branded and recognized to your school or district, and it's something that is timeless whenever possible. Also, search the hashtag before you use it. You could find some tweets you don't want to be associated with, or there is little distinction from you.

For example, I made the mistake of using #AUSD as a part of our hashtags for Arcadia Unified School District when I first created our account. Why was this a bad idea by me?

Alhambra Unified School District, AUSD
Alameda Unified School District, AUSD
Azusa Unified School District, AUSD
Albany Unified School District, AUSD - to name a few...  There is no distinction.

3. Be sure to tell people about the Twitter campaign in advance. Post about it on social media, and don't be afraid to send an email blast to your parents. They will be excited to learn about it before it happens. There doesn't need to be a school lockdown to email blast your parents, they like getting good news too! Use your own resources.


To bookend our Back to School Twitter campaign, we also use #ArcadiaHigh16 to celebrate a very proud moment for families. Graduation is another great milestone that happens every year in all school districts, and proud parents are posting all over social media about their accomplished children, and your great school. I do use the year for the graduation twitter campaigns, because I find most of the students and parents are naturally using it anyway in their own hashtags. There is a lot of talk in the commencement speeches and in yearbooks about "The Class of ___", so it's just natural for people to want to identify with their own graduating class that many of them spent the past 13 years with. In some cases, don't try and fight it, just ride the wave that was already created. Also add your standard hashtag, like #ArcadiaUnified to continue to grow that one.

Bonus Twitter Campaign:
We started hosting the Arcadia Innovation Summit in 2015, a free conference for teachers and educators to share innovative lessons and best practices. So, the first year we started a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #ArcadiaInnovation. We were thrilled to see how many people tweeted during the conference and even after. We were also amazed how the hashtag turned into a lot of unsolicited positive reviews of the conference.

The second year in 2016, the hashtag started days before the conference with people tweeting how they were looking forward to going or how they were presenters. It created a great buzz before the conference even started. Then, during it, the tweets came fast and furious! We had so many tweets that we did more than 1.1 million impressions on Twitter in just a three day period!


Connect with me on twitter at @RyanpForan