7 Ways to Think Like a Social Media Manager and Improve Your Online Classroom
Social media managers might not have a degree in education, but there is so much we as teachers can learn from them.
Unlike the good ol’ days of teaching in a classroom, where students had nowhere to look but forward, students today have every reason not to do their work. They could be scrolling Instagram, or more realistically, TikTok. They could be watching their favorite Anime, or reading their favorite Manga. They could be playing every video game under the sun (I won’t even try to name any here). Or napping. Or eating. Or walking. Or playing. The last thing they want to be doing is your lesson.
Therefore, creating engaging content that will keep them hooked long enough to finish the assignment is key to creating a successful online classroom. And who knows more about online engagement than social media managers themselves?
Take it from me, I used to be one.
For 10 years, my job was to create content, usually in the form of short, clever quips, and share them online for engagement. As some of you might know, the only thing that matters for a social media manager is something called the engagement rate. This magical, nonsensical number was how I brought on new business and retained the old.
Changing the way we think to incorporate more digital engagement strategies might also be the only way to grab your students’ attention and hold on to it long enough for them to learn something.
Here are 7 Things Social Media Managers Would Do in the Online Classroom — and you should too!
Actively Respond
Social media managers are expected to have their phone in their hands 24/7, ready to respond to a comment from a potential or current customer. If the social media manager doesn’t respond in a timely fashion, it could mean bad news for the brand he/she/they represent.
I do not, and would never recommend that you are available at all hours to your students, but I will say that a quick comment goes a long way. If you have a discussion board up and students are interacting with each other, make sure that you are in there engaging with your class as well. This will ensure that you are keeping students engaged, but it will also allow you to see when students have checked out and decide what you can do about it.
Use Multimedia
Yes this is a big “duh” moment for a lot of you. But I am not your college professor suggesting that you write a paper on why multimedia in the classroom matters, and I am not your principal asking why you don’t have a technology point in your lesson plan. I am just a regular old teacher telling you that using multimedia will engage your students and keep them in your lessons longer.
Yes, there is a lot to say about visual learners, kinesthetic learners, and those being a reason for multimedia. All of those teaching best practices are relevant and important, but that is not what we are talking about here. Appealing to different learning styles, for me, is just another benefit to using multimedia — something I can share with my supervisor during my review.
Rather, my reasoning is different. I choose to include audio in all of my lesson directions, and video for all of my tutorials, and photos and gifs in every lesson because it keeps students on the page.
Create Short Videos
I want to highlight the word short here. I understand that if you are teaching a lesson where students have to read a story like “Masque of the Red Death” and you want to include the audio, it is going to be a pretty lengthy audio clip.
And that is okay.
But what social media marketers would know is that any video longer than say, 2 minutes, is going to tap into your students’ desire to close out of your lesson and nap on the couch located two feet from their at-home desk.
Whenever applicable, keep your videos and tutorials short. I do this by something I call chunking my activities. If I am teaching how to conjugate a verb, I might make a one-minute video for Steps 1 and 2, then do practice questions. Then I’ll make another video for Steps 3 and 4 and do practice questions.
Gamify Activities
This sounds harder than it is. I have two big ways to make anything seem like a game.
The first is to make sure the students know that as long as they participate, they will get points. For example, I recently introduced a lesson on writing techniques by giving students two movie reviews (just the review itself without the movie) and having them guess what the movie was. No matter what answer they put, they were awarded full credit.
The second way to gamify your lessons is to constantly change things up. If you teach vocabulary, don’t teach it the same every week. Make their brains think a bit about each activity and experiment with different ways of learning. A matching activity feels like a game, just as an online crossword puzzle does. Experiment and get creative with your activities.
Design for User Experience
Any web designer for a big brand will tell you one of the main goals for good UX Design is to keep the consumer on the page. As soon as they click out, you have lost them. As a social media manager, I often wanted people to click on an ad, or a post, and go to the website. From there, it all came down to good design. Does the consumer know where to click to find the blog? To order the product? If it’s too confusing to find what they are looking for, they will leave the whole website without the product they came for.
We want our students to do the same. We want them to know where to click at all times, and we want them to stay on the page. Don’t provide too many links that take them away from their homework. Keep them there with internal rather than external material.
A good idea is to provide links to review sheets that they can use during assignments, or past assignments to review on their own. Please make sure to check that beautiful box that says “open link in new tab.”
Ask for Feedback
At the end of each unit, I ask students for their feedback. This gives them a chance to reflect on the new skills that they learned and how they learned them. It also gives me a chance to find out what activities they enjoyed doing, and what activities they hated.
I have done this through a simple survey (very social-media-manager of me) but I have also done this in the form of a journal. At the end of the year, I do a bigger, more final survey to gather as much feedback from them as I can. In return, it’s a nice easy grade in the grade book.
Review the Data
Asking for feedback isn’t enough. You have to be willing to review this feedback and then use it in your classroom the following semester.
Data is also important when you think about your life and career as a teacher long term. You want to be able to show another potential employer that when you switched from 10-minute videos to 3-minute videos, more students completed the assignment in full, and therefore performed better on the unit exam. Think about what key findings like that could do for entire departments!
I truly believe that gathering data and implementing key learnings into future lessons is what separates good teachers from great.
The world is constantly changing (re: COVID) and we have to be able to change and grow along with it.
Thanks for reading.
Happy teaching!
