Over the past several months our homegrown EdTech group, Let’s Go Minnesota, has been working to build a social media presence that supports educators and coaches across our region. It’s been an exciting learning journey, and I wanted to share a few takeaways that may be helpful for others doing similar work.
Let’s Go Minnesota is a locally-led network of educators that works to empower a collaborative community dedicated to continuous learning with Apple tools and inspiring innovation for every learner. We have quarterly meetings throughout the school year, and a summer institute that consists of a whole day of conference-style learning for educators in the region. You can learn more about our network on our website: https://sites.google.com/view/lets-go-mn/home
Goals
Our goal with social media is to create tutorials and share ideas that could be easily passed on to teachers, students, and others in education with the hope of making the lift of supporting schools and districts easier for technology integration coaches. Most of all, we want everyone to see that intentional uses of technology inspire and support great learning, rather than the stories we see about consumptive uses of technology that are showing up in the news so often lately.
Process
1️⃣ Making a Plan
First, we turned to AI to help us create a plan that would be sustainable and support building a platform to reach and engage educators (teachers, coaches, admins, etc.) by sharing impactful micro learning content that supports iPad integration in classrooms. We asked for strategies that would help us start and grow our social media presence, ways to track success, hashtags that could be used to ensure we were reaching our intended audience, a weekly plan to start us off, and ideas for repurposing content and scaling our impact. From this we created our plan in a shared Freeform board, including a calendar for content and a strategy to tackle new platforms. The calendar, in particular, was helpful for sharing the workload between our planning team members.
2️⃣ Starting out in Social Media
The next thing we did, since we already had a dedicated email account for Let’s Go Minnesota, was to set up the social media accounts with that email. We started with a Facebook Group, Instagram, and TikTok, since those were easy platforms to crosspost content and seemed to be places where teachers and coaches were already present. We kept our username the same so it would be easy for folks to find us.
We also decided a posting routine: micro learning videos on Monday, tutorial carousels on Tuesdays, and a project or person feature later in the week. Our initial goal was to post 3 days per week, and repost content from others on other days.
3️⃣ Creating Cohesive Content
There were a couple of non-negotiables as we began our social media journey, accessibility and adaptability. We wanted to focus on accessible content, so we used Clips and CapCut to create captions on videos, and used the accessibility features in each platform to add alt text to images. We also created a style guide so that, no matter who created our content, it would look cohesive, including templates for images in different social media image sizes. I've included these resources below to help you begin your social media journey.
We added all of the templates and images into a shared iCloud Drive so that we could share workload easily.
What we've learned so far...
A couple of months in and some trends we’ve noticed by looking at engagement data on each platform. First is that carousels of images tend to get more engagements (views and likes) on TikTok than videos, no matter how short. This is great, since carousels of 4-7 images are so much faster to produce than a video!
Posting more often results in more engagements in TikTok and Instagram, but since we’re not worried about building a following as much as we are about providing resources, we’ve chosen to stick to our original posting plan. However, posting later in the afternoon seems to get more engagements than posting earlier in the day, which makes sense when you think about when educators are mostly on Social Media.
We've also leveraged the power of Accessibility features on iPad to streamline creating videos. Using Read & Speak in Accessibility, along with very natural sounding Siri voices, we have Siri read our scripts for videos. This saves a lot of re-recording time since Siri doesn't fumble words and insert fillers like "ummm" like we humans do! Here's an example of a post using Siri to provide the VoiceOver.
What's next for LGMN Social Media
After a few months of seeing what the flow of creating content and posting looked like, we added a LinkedIn account to be more accessible to school and district leadership. We’re still learning and experimenting with using social media to build and strengthen connections with local educators. In the future we’d love to highlight educators and schools doing great learning with technology and create more content based on our community. If you’ve built (or are building) an EdTech focused social presence, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.
Like and follow us so we can connect with a wider community!
Let's Go Minnesota Facebook Group: Join Link
lets.go.minnesota on Instagram
Let's Go Minnesota on LinkedIn
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