Social media remains a powerful tool for schools to connect with their community, and Instagram continues to be a key platform for engaging students and families. While newer platforms like TikTok have gained popularity, Instagram's blend of photos, videos, and Stories offers a versatile way to showcase your school's unique narrative. Instagram's visual focus allows you to vividly capture and share the daily life, achievements, and spirit of your school community. From classroom activities and sports events to student art projects and campus improvements, the platform provides an ideal space to highlight what makes your school special. View the School Social Media Guide here The app's features like Reels, Stories, and IGTV enable you to create diverse content that appeals to different age groups within your school community. Families might appreciate behind-the-scenes glimpses of school operations, while students could be more drawn to fun, short-form video content. By consistently sharing engaging visual content, you can foster a stronger sense of community and school pride. Instagram also offers opportunities for two-way communication through comments and direct messages, allowing for more direct engagement with students, parents, and alumni. Pro Tip: Remember to stay informed about privacy settings and best practices for schools on social media to ensure you're using the platform responsibly and effectively. 1. Build a Team Your first step in using Instagram at your school is to get some help posting photos. Assemble a team of staffers who understand your mission, are willing to participate and contribute, and are comfortable sharing the responsibility of helping manage the Instagram process. Getting a team together will also help generate interest and accelerate use of Instagram as an ongoing way to share school happenings. Remember, more than one person can take and share the pictures. Collaboration is important so you’re not saddled with running the whole show yourself. You can appoint various team members to be responsible for certain content areas and submit photos accordingly. Like a photo editor running your school’s own photo publishing empire, you can designate or assign individuals to cover both planned events and ad hoc photo opportunities. Also, while there are some photo enhancement apps available to stylize and dress up your photos, don’t overdo it. The photos don't need to be perfect. People like authentic scenes. 2. Put Together an Instagram Plan Part of your team’s first task is to determine if your school will have more than one official Instagram account. We recommend having just one account to start, but if your team has a high degree of participation and enthusiasm for the channel, you can create and manage multiple Instagram accounts. You might want to create one for each school, or certain departments (e.g., athletics, theater, arts, band) and designate those as official school accounts. Remember, individuals (students and staff) might also be contributing and sharing through their own personal accounts, so you want to make it easy on your photo-snapping contributors to switch from one Instagram account to another. Similarly, if you’re the designated master Instagram editor for your district—managing multiple account across or within schools—you’re going to want to be able to toggle easily from one account to another. 3. Schedule Your Posts While much of the beauty of social media is the spontaneous nature of sharing ideas and images, you should also understand that you can plan and schedule your Instagram posts. For the busy school communications professional whose day doesn’t end when the last school bell rings, you might want to look into some Instagram scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and SproutSocial. Using tools such as these can go a long way to extend your Instagram reach at times when you know real-time posts won’t be occurring. You can keep positive sharing happening after school hours, over the weekend, and anytime you want to reach your school community. Instagram scheduling tools are especially important when you want to be strategic with your photo sharing (e.g., promote an event, announce achievements, share results.) Remember that your school Instagram activity is not all about generating original content from and about your school, but sharing photos from those following your school. “Re-gramming” is a vital strategic tool for your school to use to share important and relevant content you want to link to your school. Be on the lookout for the kinds of imagery and ideas you want to share with your students, faculty, staff, families, and the community, then “re-gram’ them. 4. Instagram as an Invitation Think of Instagram as an appetizer or teaser to entice visitors to drill down for deeper information if they choose. While a photo can stand on its own as it’s own story (see the old adage: a picture is worth a thousand words), it can also serve to push viewers to a deeper dive on where that picture was taken, what the picture is about, or search for other snapshots of similar events on the rest of your page. Give your audiences a taste of what you’re talking about through a photo and a snappy caption. Just like Yahoo or MSN does it on their homepage, the right image can go a long way in keeping people in your content space. Also, be sure to tag people (link to names/accounts) in your photos. When tagging photos, if you don’t see the person’s name in the dropdown menu, tap "search for person" to find if they have an account. 5. Build Your Following Like the rest of your social media, Instagram content is easy to share across other channels. Whether it’s a quick pic on the spot, or a photo you’ve scheduled to post in advance, a simple adjustment on your Instagram settings menu you can automatically distribute that same content to your choice of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and other popular social media. Go into your profile, select "Share Settings” from the “Preferences” menu and choose the other social media to which you want to feed your Instagram post. The use of hashtags (#) on your photos and videos will also help spread your posts. Hashtags, remember, help group your content by category. Use the caption field to include a hashtag (e.g., MapledaleTitansHoops). Remember, besides sharing images and ideas, your goal with Instagram is to gain followers and build your community, so automatic sharing and hashtags are real workhorses in helping spread the word.
