Our new suprintendent would like for us to establish a Twitter and Facebook presence. We would like some feedback from districts who have these pages:
1. Suggestions for account settings –2. Do you allow commenting? How do you handle negative/inappropriate comments?3. Do you have multiple people posting or one contact person?4. Do you have guidleines for depatments/campuses who would like to have something posted?5. Advice on anything that will make this implementation successful?

Stuart Burt (Chapel Hill ISD in Mount Pleasant, Texas (where I lived for 2 years)) shares his district’s approach, well worth quoting here:

1. Setup a Facebook “page” instead of an account and link it to the district Twitter account.  Once you get 25 “likes” you can get a username like ours facebook.com/chisd and fb.com/chisd2. We allow comments, but not wall posts.  So far we have not had negative comments on any wall posts.  People that are on our district Facebook are pretty nice.
3. All of our principals have the correct permissions to post to the district page.  Once a user has “liked” our page, they can be made a page admin.
4. Our guidelines state that no picture of any single student is posted, group shots only.  The principals must also check the acknowledgement form to make sure they have parent permission to use photos. No names are put into the captions or tags.  So far no issues with posting of student activities and gatherings.
5. Our facebook/twitter experience has been a positive one.  We have around 500 people that “like” our page. It is a great way to get the word out to our community and parents.  Notifying of bad weather days this year was great with facebook and twitter.
I would be glad to answer any other questions.

To elaborate on Stuart’s excellent response, I was curious about how to link a Facebook Page to a Twitter account. This process works with Pages you happen to setup in Facebook and your personal Twitter, too.

To start the process, login to Facebook and go to this web address:

Once there, you will see several options…here’s what my Pages look like:

Note that Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org isn’t linked to Twitter…but to link it, just click the “Link to Twitter” button and you’ll be prompted to allow Facebook to use your Twitter account:

Once you authorize, it will go about doing that and then show you the following when successful:

That’s all there is to it! Now, you just need to update your Facebook Page and you’ll see the content come out on Twitter without having to publish in more than one place at a time.

If you’re using Seesmic on your smartphone (e.g. Android, iPhone), you can post directly from your phone to your Facebook page using their app. It is quite a nifty app and whips the native Facebook app (at least, on Android it does).

Note the PAGES tab in the Seesmic screen, as shown below:

You can post directly to your Facebook Page from Seesmic. Great stuff.

Oh, here’s another story shared by a colleague responding to the questions at the top of this blog entry:

We began using Facebook in October. As of today, we have 302 followers.  The community loves it.  Even the radio station watches our posts to put things on the news. I decided not to do a Twitter account.1. Make sure you do your security settings.2. Love to receive comments!!  I have it set so I am alerted the moment a comment is posted.  If it is inappropriate, I can delete it.  So far, all comments have been very positive.3. I am the only one who can post.4.I’ve solicited the help of some of my parents to text me scores for athletic events so we can post up-to-the-minute action.  I give out my cell phone number to all the coaches and teachers and they text me with posts.5.  I’d be glad to talk with you if you need some more answers.  Just call.

Hmm…thoughts?

---

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

---