You can hardly open a journal or watch the evening news without hearing the term Facebook. As a school administrator or teacher, maybe you even have your own personal Facebook page. Or maybe you’ve still got your heels dug in out of principle, refusing to make friends with the popular social media platform. Sure it may have a place for individuals, businesses, or brands, but does it have any place in education?

The answer is a resounding Yes.

Facebook currently claims “twenty percent of all page views in the U.S.” with the average person spending approximately 20 minutes or more on the site. With almost 518 million users worldwide, educational institutions would be remiss if they continue to shun social media and the myriad ways they could use sites like Facebook to their benefit.

One of the largest problems school face is communicating with parents and the community, not only about educational changes or implementation strategies, but about the everyday workings of a school. Fundraisers. Field trips. Volunteers. Sporting events. Snow days. How to drop your child off in the morning. There are a million things schools need parents to know.

While some schools may place important information on their school website, unless parents frequently visit the website they miss the information. And many parents have children in more than one school, which would mean checking multiple school websites each day. While having a well-designed and functional website is absolutely necessary, it doesn’t always deliver information in a timely manner.

Since the advent of the copy machine, schools have relied on the seemingly tried-and-true tactic of sending flyers home or occasionally using telephone relay systems to spread important messages. We all know where those flyers end up: in the bottom of backpacks or in the recycle bin. And phone relay systems are only effective if people answer the phone or listen to the messages. Caller ID changes everything.

So where are your parents and how can you reach them? Well, a great majority of them are on Facebook. About 54% of Facebook users are women, with over 43% of them between the ages of 25 and 44. That’s most K-12 schools’ target audience right there. These women are reading information about their friends and family on an established platform and probably doing so more than once a day. They check Facebook from their cell phones, iPads, and computers. If schools want to reach parents in today’s technological world, they need to do it via social media. Which means making friends with Facebook.

So how do schools manage social media? Or establish their very own Facebook page? Stay tuned! Each Monday we’ll be talking about how your schools and districts can effectively embrace social media and why it’s crazy not to do so.