Why is this?
If you’re not sharing your story on social media, someone else is! Not having official school accounts opens the door for a third party to post and share content unofficially, on behalf of your program, which is certainly not what you want!
When setting up these accounts, you may need to get approval from your administration. If this is the case, hopefully you have a good relationship and this can be a quick conversation.
If not, and there is more backlash, you’ll want to provide evidence as to why it is important to your school. Providing Gipper's Social Media Certification for High School ADs, can also help give your administration confidence that you will be handling social media appropriately.
Naming the Accounts
Examples of official accounts from Gipper Partner Schools
For any social channel, you should have a program-wide official account. This should be something like: “SchoolNameAthletics” - so it is clear to anyone who the account belongs to.
If your program is bigger or simply more seasoned on social media, using multiple sport-specific accounts can also be a great way to ensure equitable coverage across different sports. Empowering coaches to run these team accounts can be an effective way to do this, but only if you are sure they can be trusted to follow your brand guidelines!
Sharing Login Credentials
For all official accounts, make sure the login credentials are available to your athletic department! This is critical and prevents a situation in which someone leaves your program and then takes the account with them.
Official accounts represent your program, so make sure they stay with your program!!
Hope this helps and thanks so much for reading :)
- Jack
Jack Zamore is the Chief Marketing Officer at Gipper. Gipper is a platform that helps high school athletic departments create professional sports graphics for social media - in seconds, on any device, and without needing any design experience.
Learn more @ gogipper.com