Setting Up Your School's Twitter Account

Twitter is a social media platform that allows you to share character-limited snippets into your school’s life with the addition of imagery and video. Popular amongst the 24+ age category, Twitter is a great way to tap into your alumni network. Not set up any social media yet? Read our post on ‘Why Your School Needs Social Media’ first.  

How do I set it up?

With all social media networks, we’d suggest setting them up linked to a generic social media email address for your school. That way, if someone leaves or moves on, there’s no risk of the social media account being manipulated. We’d suggest creating a generic email like: socialmedia@yourschool.com. (This also means you’ll avoid the numerous emails from all your accounts!)

Out of Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is the easiest to set up as it’s independent – but we’d still recommend everything is consistent across your social media networks first.

 Your Handle

Similarly to Instagram, each Twitter account is able to select a handle. Make sure that you’re using a consistent handle across all social media and that it reflects your location & school. We suggested structuring it like @YourSchoolLDN or @LDNyourschool so that visitors & followers know your school’s name and location. (Don’t forget that you could abbreviate your school’s initials to make it shorter). On Twitter, your handle will be how followers will tag your school so make sure you’re happy with it. We’re at @digitiseschool.

Your Profile

Like Facebook, Twitter users can set up a profile with a profile image and a header image. As you’re probably still setting up all your accounts, we’d suggest keeping this consistent across them all for now. As your social media presence grows, you could consider changing this in due course. Your Twitter profile also gives you the opportunity to add a short (character-limited) biography and a link  - again, we’d suggest making sure this is consistent across all your social media.

Your Hashtags

Just like Instagram, hashtags are popular across Twitter and are a great way to group posts. They’re also a great way of sharing your tweets with a new audience that may not follow you. We’d suggest starting using these by using the hashtag that you’ve created for your school (e.g. #DigitiseMySchool) and then identifying some key hashtags that you’d want to use. These could be #ALevels or #GCSEResults – it’s up to you!

 Now what?

Twitter is quite different to Facebook and Instagram insofar as it does have a character limit so tweets are much snappier than a Facebook and Instagram post may be – but Twitter is also a great way at engaging quickly with individuals. We’d suggest working out what you’d like to use Twitter for before you start tweeting! Let us know when you do by following us on @digitiseschool and using our hashtag #DigitiseMySchool. We’d always suggest following a couple more accounts that are relevant – that could be competitor schools, the official accounts for your qualifications or exam boards – anything. We’d strongly advise against following any parents or students to avoid conflicts of interest.

Ready to get started? Keep your eyes peeled for a Twitter guide post that should help you kick start your school’s Twitter presence.