Knowledge Base

Setting up a school Twitter account

Below is a step by step guide to setting up a twitter account for schools

  1. Create a shared e-mail mailbox for social media, e.g. socialmedia@schoolname.la.sch.uk (please raise a case on the helpdesk for us to set this up for you)
  2. Sign up for Twitter – follow the instructions on the twitter help guide to set up your Twitter account – https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/create-twitter-account

Security settings

On the home screen you will find an ellipsis icon on the left hand side , click this button and then select ‘Settings & privacy’.

Once on this page go to your Security and privacy settings. Click on ‘Privacy and safety’ and then click on ‘Audience and tagging’.  In this section there is are options to ‘Protect your Tweets’ and ‘Photo tagging’. Below are some reasons why you should protect your tweets and reasons why you shouldn’t protect your tweets – the decision to protect or not will depend on the school policies.

Positive reasons for protecting tweets:

  1. It may feel like protecting your tweets is safer, and would be a better safeguarding policy.
  2. Random people are unable to view your tweets without prior approval.
  3. Photos and information from your school are more protected.

Negative reasons for protecting tweets:

  1. If you have this box ticked, it doesn’t make your page very accessible as people have to be accepted to view your twitter page.
  2. Following isn’t Friending. On Facebook people have to ask permission to see more details. That’s entirely appropriate, because you probably have personal information on there that you likely want to keep private. On Twitter, your entire bio is 160 characters.
  3. It is likely that a school would tweet about upcoming school events, achievements, school holidays, trips, etc. These are all public on the school website anyway so there is no reason to limit the access from Twitter
  4. It would be difficult to manage and verify genuine users, even if you were approved all parents you would still limit access to their friends and family members.
  5. If an unsavoury character starts following you on Twitter, you can block that account. Routine maintenance of your twitter followers would be recommended.
  6. Many schools add their twitter feed right on their school website, if you account is “protected” you do not have this ability.

 

Important

You should always tick the box in ‘Photo tagging’ so that ‘Only people you follow can tag you’

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