SIPA Awards SubmissionA brief description of our team:Our team consists of a team of rotating interns answering to one main supervisor. Over the summer, one intern worked 29 hours per week and devoted her efforts towards overhauling our social media strategy beginning in May. Once the new strategy was soundly in place, she created “Best Practices” documents to pass on to her colleagues. From August until December 2015, two interns worked a total of 40 hours to execute this new strategy that produced unheard of results compared to previous years. Through a combination of seasoned expertise and innovative new ideas, Education Week Events has become a force whose social media strategy generates real results—whether it be engagements with our audience, dissemination of crucial information, recognition of unsung heroes in education, or registration for events.

A brief description of our audience and industry: We work in the K-12 education journalism space. Our primary duties include promoting webinars that are both editorial as well as advertorial. Our editorial webinars invite outside experts to speak on a subject that our publication Education Week has recently covered. Advertorials, on the other hand, promote topics and services from outside companies. We also have a wide base for our live chats that can be either editorial or advertorial in nature. We also hold live events such as sponsored, editorially-driven leadership dinners and our largest event in March—Leaders To Learn From. Our followers on all platforms are majority educators and district-level leaders interested in education professional development. Our follower-base is primarily female (62%) and above the age of 45.

Significance of our materials and how it aids our viewer base:

The intent of our material is primarily to promote the Education Week brand as well as promote attendance of our live and virtual events. Our Social Media strategy this past year has been focused on two different arenas:

1. We promote webinars more consistently and raise engagement. In the past, users rarely engaged with our content, and our social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn). This year, we began focusing on more personalized content and catering those approaches to our most popular platforms of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to better focus our efforts.

2. We created a strategy to not only promote our events weeks before they happen, but have a continued strategy to utilize the material. We had pre-event communications, live tweeting during our events, as well as post-event messaging to keep users engaged after the event.

3. Combining this approach, we employed visually-enhanced, more numerous visuals which led us closer to our goal. We find users engage with our live and virtual event content more, because the work is focused on the improvement of educators from the school to district-wide level.

Moreover, most of our virtual events are free for users to promote better understandings of upcoming material in education, and spread the word of the takeaways and quotes resulting from these events.

2015 Social Media StrategyOur Social Media Strategy in 2015 has shifted to more user-friendly media that was aimed at proving greater engagement. As the judges will see, our numbers have increased across the board from our main platforms of Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest over the course of the year. Judges will see many fluctuations in our numbers month over month, however, due to the nature of our promotions and the sales cycle that funds our events. Certain months have more salient events/deadlines/announcements that annually gain greater traction. Further, judges will see that these cause fluctuations between months especially with our Twitter users. The general trend, however, is solid upward growth compared to previous years, with summer—a traditional low point for sales—being our busiest months. We have leveraged the lean summer months for exceptional social media engagement. We also used exceptional months to build adaptive strategies for experimentation. We experimented with different types of pictures, different wording, optimal posting times, etc. to build the perfect strategy for our brand through trial and error in 2015.

Twitter: On Twitter, we varied our tweets in language and added more robust images to capture users’ attention. We included a direct message strategy to increase nominations for Leaders To Learn From (our annual gathering of the best in K-12 education), cement new registrations for our live event held in March 2016, and alerted potential webinar guests and sponsors about their events to motivate them to reach out to their followers, and to notify our past awardees (Leaders To Learn From) that tweets would be posted about them the coming week, so they and their school districts would spread the word to their followers: parents, teachers, colleagues, chambers of commerce, mayor’s offices, and city councils who support the schools.

2015 Twitter Data  December November October September August July June May April March February JanuaryAverage Link Clicks

.66 0.63 0.58 0.84 0.62 0.50 0.84 0.69 1.33 0.83 0.95 0.79

Total Link Clicks

194 80.00 134.00 240.00 44.00 88.00 272.00 162.00 166.00 192.00 127.00 117.00

Average Impressions

304.7 372.15 347.48 416.32 285.69 272.86 521.37 414.74 822.67 411.21 461.66 387.28

Total Tweets 295 127.00 232.00 286.00 70.00 176.00 324.00 234.00 124.00 230.00 133.00 147.00Average Engagements

2.96 2.27 2.28 3.26 2.66 2.70 5.99 5.87 4.92 4.43 4.22 2.72

Average Favorites

1.15 0.43 0.33 0.51 0.51 0.27 0.61 0.40 0.41 0.58 0.44 0.23

Average Retweets

.80 0.45 0.40 0.58 0.18 0.26 2.54 3.22 1.13 0.60 0.56 0.49

Some of our most successful tweets: These tweets were successful because of their effective use of images and tagging to relevant actors with many followers.

Tweet Found Here

Live- and Post-Event TweetingWe began live- and post-tweeting about our webinars. The following are our results. In sum, the peach colored bars below show results from before we implemented the new strategy. The yellow bar represents a webinar where we only live-tweeted. The green bar represents the growth found when we live- and post-event tweet. This small sampling of larger data that we found demonstrates that live- and post-tweeting elevate impressions as well as engagement from both attendees and non-attendees with our webinars.

050

100150200250300350

217.4 225 242 242 290

Average ImpressionsAv

g Im

pres

sions

Key

No Live Tweets, No Q&A

Live Tweets, No Q&A Live Tweets and Q&A

Connecting t

he Clas

sroom to

the C

loud (Micr

osoft),

May 6

Making C

omplex Te

xts Compelli

ng to M

iddle-Sch

ool Studen

ts,

May 12

Secret

s for 1

-to-1 Su

ccess:

Planning,

Pedag

ogy, an

d Patien

ce (M

icrosoft),

June 3

Amplifying S

tudent V

oice,

May 28

No More

Word Lis

ts: Tea

ching Vocab

ulary i

n Context,

June 4

010002000300040005000600070008000

Total Impressions

05

1015202530

Change in Activity

FavoritesRT'sLink Clicks

Num

ber o

f tim

es a

ction

take

n

Engagement Strategies with Tweet FormatWe varied our Tweet formats throughout the beginning of the period examined. We found that there were certain strategies when we formatted Tweets that worked better for our brand than others. Asking a question in a tweet would generally gain us more impressions, link clicks, and retweets.

Asking a QuestionAsking a QuestionAsking a QuestionAsking a QuestionAsking a QuestionAsking a QuestionAsking a QuestionAsking a Question

Using Q&AUsing Q&AUsing Q&AUsing Q&AUsing Q&AUsing Q&AUsing Q&AUsing Q&A

Facebook:On Facebook we found success with our new ad strategy that we began this year. With only a small budget invested, we found that the return was phenomenal. Due largely to this strategy, we received over 700 nominations for 14 spots in our Leaders To Learn From special edition. Furthermore, due to more engaging posts, greater frequency of posting, and shortened descriptions, our numbers have raised considerably in terms of impressions and engagement compared to last year.

YearTotal

Tweets Total Impressions

Average Impressions Per

Post Total Engagment

(Likes, Clicks, Shares)Average Engagments (Likes, Share,

Clicks)2014 (Jan.-Oct.) 290.0 14295.0 55.0 262.0 1.02015 (Jan.-Oct.) 303.0 22467.0 77.5 765.0 2.8Percent Change 4.5 57.2 40.9 192.0 175.0

Facebook AdFlight: July 6-August 1st budgeted $20 daily per adAd Type: Clicks to Website Audience: Location US; Age 25-64; Gender all; Interests: Board of Education, school district, primary school, middle school, high school. Education technology, K-12 (education), Common Core State Standards Initiative, test (assessment); Job Role: Educators; Potential Reach 60,000 people. Script: Headline: Nominate Leaders for 2016. Text: Nominate exceptional leaders in your school district as a 2016 Leader To Learn From!

Results:

$509.04 Spent

1,102 Ad Clicks

93,347 Impressions

25,276 Reached

21 Likes 14 Shares

Pinterest:We raised our Pinterest engagement and impressions drastically this year.

1. First, we began posting more regularly, and included our posts to community boards. 2. Second, we worked on creating more Pinterest-friendly artwork to post. 3. We also learned the hard way that constant upkeep is needed on Pinterest. Our final two months lagged in frequency of posts, and we saw

firsthand its impact

These two actions not only increased our following, but our repins and other engagement over the course of the year. This was the first year that we had consistent posting to the platform. We saw what other pinterest users were posting and we changed our own strategy to match what was popular:

Our Shift

Other Pinterest Users:

Pinterest Continued:

Jan FebMarc

hApri

lMay June

July

Aug

Sept Oct November December

Average monthly viewers

1921232

14677 1763

1,128

2624

773 579159

1252

51476 45

Average monthly engaged

9 10 39 19 8 27 5 6 14 22 14 4

Average Daily

Impressions

87 279 368 25 4 90 16 49 123 165 38 24

Repins 4 13 34 1 0 11 3 2 5 9 5 1Clicks 2 8 29 12 22 7 2 12 18 15 4 5

Engagement StrategiesThis year, we focused on more interactive content for our brand. Many of these new ideas promoted Leaders To Learn From, our live event held in March featuring recognizing 14 leaders each year for their exceptional work in K-12 leadership. These ideas were integrated into our website (leaders.edweek.org) which also serves as the live event microsite to generate user impressions and provide a clearer indicator of what the registrants will get out of attending the event.

1. Storify We have found that Storify projects are effective when we tell the larger story of the event in an interesting, multimedia style. These Storify projects were created to promote webinars that had already passed, and give more insight into the interaction of users with the content. Our Storify around Leaders To Learn From, we demonstrating how users interacted with the hashtag #LeadersToLearnFrom on the day of the event.

Webinar Storify: https://storify.com/edweekevents/amplifying-student-voice Webinar Storify: https://storify.com/edweekevents/inside-the-opt-out-movement Leaders To Learn From Storify: https://storify.com/edweekevents/leaders-to-learn-from-2015 (Example Below)

2. StorymapWhere Leadership Lives: http://leaders.edweek.org/where-leadership-lives/?intc=ltlfnavtop We created a Storymap to showcase the 16 Leaders that were recognized for their work in the 2015 Leaders To Learn From special report. This “Storymap” is an interactive map that we promoted via social media and our website taking readers on a journey around the country showing them each leadership story and the leaders’ accomplishments.

3. TimelineTimeline: http://leaders.edweek.org/a-year-in-review/?intc=ltlfnavtopWe created this Timeline to describe what the year entailed for Leaders To Learn From from the start of the selection process to the culmination in the February special report and the March live event. The purpose is to provide transparency about the leaders as well as the event itself. The goal was to gain more registrants for our live event, and provide audience development more opportunity to recruit attendees.

4. Canva-generated images

We have found that images generated with quotes through Canva.com work exceptionally well for Education Week in terms of total impressions, but more importantly, audience engagement. Canva-generated images increased engagements on Twitter and Pinterest due to their eye-catching nature and their social-friendly appeal.

+333%+35%+166%+58%

+35%

We also found that our Canva photos were more successful on Twitter than our Art Department, professionally-generated Webinar artwork was. When using a Canva photo in comparison to our professional artwork, we found the following:

23.7% more likely to see audience engagement and 9.1% more likely to get link clicks.

■23.7% more engagements●39.2% more impressions than

Photoshopped pics.■9.1% more link clicks

Canva vs. Art Department