In 2021, the things you can do on social media are near-endless. Whether it’s meeting people with a shared passion, linking up with professionals in your field or learning about how new state laws will affect you and your community, you can just about find it all on social media, especially Twitter.
I mention Twitter because it’s one of the fastest moving social media platforms there is. It’s where you can go to discover and explore breaking news, check out what’s trending around you or worldwide, and follow who you want to see on your timeline every time you log on— regardless if your preferences are for personal-use or professional.
When I worked in news, I loved Twitter to get news out fast. In the last six years, though, it’s been a great tool to network with other School PR professionals from across the state. Because of it, we are no longer confined to catching up once a year at our annual TSPRA conference.
By utilizing specific hashtags, we’re able to engage with other people within our industry, as well as ask for feedback, help, tips or advice. Regardless of the size of the department, most School PR folks run into similar issues, and what social media tool is there to save the day? Twitter itself.
Getting the most from Twitter hashtags
Whether you want to collaborate with other professionals in your field or you’re just looking for a place to find helpful tips from others in your industry, looking for specific content through hashtags or typing keywords on the app’s search bar may be your best bet at finding the answers you need. On the other side of the spectrum, if you’re the one with the answers, using industry-specific hashtags could help you be more visible on the platform and get your tips in the hands of more users.
Hashtags are useful because they help group tweets and conversations about specific topics together so they’re easier to search for. They’re so popular that a few years ago, Twitter started suggesting topics you could follow on your timeline based on the hashtags and users you engaged with (what a cool way to use Social Media Network Analytics to their advantage!). So when someone clicks on a hashtag, they can see all the profiles and public posts that have that specific hashtag. For instance, if I were to search for #Halloween, I could probably find thousands of DIY activities, spooky snack ideas and costume-planning posts that used that specific phrase.
I’ve used the same handful of hashtags for my job the last few years, but I’ve never thought to explore how they do on a wider scale. So, this week I started a 30-day trial for the social media management platform Sprout Social to explore some of my go-to hashtags and see what kind of data I could find free of charge.
The hashtags I wanted to analyze were:
- #BackToSchool
- #K12
- #SchoolPr
- #TxLege
- #eLearning
My Analysis
While I do work for a school district, I didn’t want to pick generic or broad terms like “education” or “school” because I wanted to get the analysis data as specific as possible.
I also set the reporting period from June 25, 2021 to September 18, 2021 because I wanted to track these keywords from right before school started, to about a month afterwards. I was curious about this time period because in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott made it so school districts would not get funding if they offered an online option this school year and then later made it so that government-funded institutions were prohibited to require masks indoors (it’s safe to say it’s been a hectic couple of months). As someone who was constantly looking for updates on Twitter, I knew those would be interesting hashtags to explore.
With 6,694 average uses per day, 374,836 total share of volume and a 40.4 percent growth trend, #BackToSchool was the most popular hashtag among those I tracked. While I anticipated the numbers to be high for this time period, it’s interesting to wonder just how many of those were used in a negative way, and how many were positive “Excited to be #BackToSchool!” posts.
The next keyword I searched for was #K12. This hashtag is fun to go through because it’s a general commentary on K-12 education so you can see what teachers, staff, parents and people around you are saying about it. I first learned about this hashtag during a #EdChat, which is a weekly organized discussion on Twitter of mostly educators that meet virtually to discuss popular topics in education. During that reporting period, #K12 had an average of 652 mentions per day and was used by librarians, teachers and school boards.
I wanted to track #eLearning because of how many times I saw it on our comments these last four months by parents demanding an online or virtual option. According to Sprout Social, it was used an average of 1,195 per day, had a total volume of 66,939 and a growth trend of -31.9 percent, which makes sense since we have seen anger subside a tad across our social media platforms.
While #TxLege may seem like an unusual hashtag for those in education to explore, those of us in School PR know how quickly we’re expected to make plans and take action with any new legislation. When scrolling through this hashtag, it’s interesting how much of it is in fact school related, which can be attributed to the pandemic. This particular hashtag was used an average of 5,941 times per day and its growth trend was down -12.6 percent. It is important to note that this hashtag is a combination of school-related legislation in Texas, as well as non-school related.
The final hashtag I tracked, and probably my favorite, was #SchoolPR. I first learned about this hashtag about six years ago during my first TSPRA conference. While it only gets an average of 37 uses a day and had a total volume of 2,086, it mostly only gets used by those in the Texas School Public Relations Association and the National School Public Relations Association so our numbers aren’t that big to begin with. It may sound easier to simply tag a specific person you want an answer from on Twitter, but using hashtags such as this one opens up your questions to those in the field on a national level, which could give you additional and unique perspectives.
Conclusion
Using Sprout Social made it simple to look at specific keywords in depth, and free of charge. I liked that it offered the option to toggle profiles on and off, and provided a visual way as to how they compared to one another over a certain period of time.
There are some hashtags like #BacktoSchool that wouldn’t make sense to track year round, but it would be neat to see how far into the school year people use it.
I didn’t specifically search my employer as I wanted to focus more on the hashtags related to the sector I work in versus my actual job, but I’d love to see the data Sprout Social could provide on how our district hashtag does in comparison to our neighboring school districts. After going through this tool several times this week, I’m happy to have one more tool in my arsenal when looking to run keyword analysis on social media.