WHEN THE SOLAR eclipse crossed the country in late August, the Park Hill School District in Kansas City, Mo., found itself right in the path of the totality, meaning our students and staff would get to see the total eclipse during the school day.

As part of our communication plan to let families know about this, we posted information about how we planned to handle the eclipse on social media.

On our Facebook post, we had 790 positive reactions and 120 positive comments thanking us for letting students and staff experience the eclipse at school. On the other hand, there were five negative comments suggesting we should have canceled school.

When our district leaders received a couple of negative calls about our eclipse plans, the data from Facebook proved exceptionally useful to put the concerns in context. Clearly, the vast majority of our community embraced this learning opportunity.

Enthusiastic Voices
One of the reasons Facebook is a valuable tool for school districts is that it provides real-time, authentic, two-way communication and public engagement. Not only can we use it to tell our district’s parents, employees and community members about the wonderful things happening in our schools every day, we also can use it to listen to the voice of our customers.

Mostly, that voice is positive. The bulk of the comments we receive enthusiastically support our schools and district. They even can be helpful. Recently, one of our local TV stations misinterpreted our message that school buses were running late due to flooding, and the station reported incorrectly that schools were starting late. We learned of this error quickly, thanks to a question from a parent on our Facebook post.

As in the case of our solar eclipse post, when there are negative comments, our patrons often answer for us.

“Check your kids out of school, then,” a patron responded to the mother who wanted us to cancel classes for the day. “I think it is an amazing in-school learning event. I think it is great that the school district is so excited to share the event with students and staff.”

Engagement Rules
When someone just wants to make a virtual scene, the rules of engagement for social media are similar to the rules for dealing with upset people in person.

“If I believe someone is seeking a solution, I will continue to engage,” says Kristin Magette, director of communications in the Eudora Public Schools in Kansas. “If someone is just trying to argue and isn’t interested in a solution, I don’t mind walking away. If someone were to stumble on the thread, they would see that we provided a calm, definitive response.”

Sometimes a patron might have a criticism that would be better addressed offline. Perhaps it involves a student matter, which raises a privacy concern, or possibly it just re-quires an in-depth conversation. When this arises, we post a response encouraging the person to call the appropriate administrator to discuss the issue in person or over the phone.

Kimberly Moritz, superintendent of the Springville-Griffith Institute Central School District in western New York, actively uses social media to communicate with her district’s patrons, but when parents tried tagging her in a question about a safety issue, she wrote a blog post steering them to call her directly or come by the district office.

“Complex problems require that kind of face-to-face communication,” Moritz says. “For us to fully understand the problem, we need to talk about it.”

Private Messaging
Not all of the feedback we receive on Facebook is public. In the last year, Facebook beefed up its messaging feature for pages, which allows followers of our page to send us private messages. People use this tool most often for general questions and concerns. Just as we do with our e-mails and voice messages, we try to get back to people within 24 hours.

Facebook allows us to be responsive to community and stakeholder input and to measure public sentiment about our messages. But in the end, this is just another tool, so the rules of good communication, customer service and civility still apply.