ANY OF YOUR school district’s English language arts teachers will tell you that tone and voice are important aspects of writing, and your district’s director of public relations, if you are lucky enough to have one, will tell you that you should tailor those qualities to your particular audience.

The audience for your social media accounts has different expectations than the audience for a more formal publication or a letter to an individual. Social media is more conversational.

This is why you’ll find big, national brands posting messages with humor and corresponding with followers as if they are texting a friend.

Social Humor
Fast-food chain Wendy’s is known for being funny on Twitter. Recently, the company teased its competition: “Hey @McDonalds, heard the news. Happy #NationalFrozenFoodDay to you for all the frozen beef that’s sticking around in your cheeseburgers.”

School districts are no different — particularly districts fortunate to have social media specialists on their teams.

The Waterloo Region District School Board in Ontario, Canada, recently posted this on Twitter: “The weather wizards weren’t ready to give our students and staff a #snowday. All our schools are OPEN and buses are running. Happy #FriYAY.” They even included an animated GIF.

The Franklin Special School District in Tennessee posted several tweets on Valentine’s Day that parodied the silly puns that children often send each other on the holiday. One of the district’s posts showed some students wearing fake mustaches and other photo-booth props with the caption, “There’s no disguising it … we hope you have a #HappyValentinesDay.”

And the Cherokee County Schools in Canton, Ga., got national attention last year when the district responded with humor to students trying to lobby them for a snow day. To a student who asked, “Tryna cancel school tomorrow?” the district’s Twitter account responded, “We’re not tryna, but we’re monitoring conditions and forecasts to see if we hafta.”

Underlying Messages
These kinds of fun or silly messages might be too informal for the district’s official newsletter or website, but they are quite appropriate for social media. More importantly, they are engaging ways to convey district messages. The underlying message for Waterloo’s snow tweet was that school was in session, but the delivery made the message more palatable to disappointed children.

The underlying messages for Franklin’s Valentine tweet was that students are having fun and the district cares about its stakeholders, but the delivery was much more effective than stating that sentiment in dry, formal terms.

And the intention of the Cherokee County response was that safety is the primary factor in snow-day decisions, but the delivery was more suited to the question and medium.

Not So Funny
The risk in using humor in your school district’s social media is not about sounding too informal. It is using inappropriate humor.

Particularly when students send snarky messages to the district’s Twitter account as they lobby for a snow day, it can be tempting to reply with equal snark.

But if we ever give anyone a hard time from our social media accounts, it should be directed at ourselves. Self-deprecating humor is funny. Teasing students is not.

In my school district, we try to use an informal tone and engaging, personal content in our social media, but we are not as adept with quick humor as other districts.

So we recently took advantage of a professional development opportunity to hear Greta Perel speak. An expert copywriter and former university professor, Perel boiled down successful social media copywriting to four elements: humor, likeability, curiosity and small words.

She told us all readers are “lazy, selfish and distracted” when consuming content, so we must write in a way that grabs readers and cuts through the clutter.

With this road map in mind for my district’s social media voice, my team and I are ready to punch up our tweets and Facebook posts and try our hand at a little more humor.