At the start of the school year, you should have your staff follow the newspaper's social media accounts if they aren't already. Then they should ask their friends and family to follow as well. Then you need to start the year strong and challenge them to post on your newspaper's accounts every single school day.

I have a social media director/team that is in charge of this. Do NOT give everyone access to the accounts and passwords. Have them post one original thing on each platform a day, like something from another account (that is school appropriate), and retweet something on Twitter. No one wants to follow or engage with an account that doesn't give back.

This chart allows the staff to track the followers at the start of the month and compare it to the end of the month. You should also run a Google Analytics report for that month. Can your staff see a difference? Where are readers coming from?