SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR SCHOOLS: The 20s will be a brand-driven decade and we are seeing solid evidence of it from the first year itself. From businesses to firms and even educational institutions, you need to promote and build a brand to make it big. While schools are now rapidly trying to build teams of specialists to handle their brand reputation and new ways to increase admissions, the most obvious pathway to this is social media marketing.
Social media marketing for schools:
Social media is growing and becoming more than just a platform for influencers and entertainers. With more than half of the world population actively using social media and about 90% of that being young students who are the direct beneficiaries of the services of the education sector, it becomes crucial for schools to establish and build a reputation online and engage with the social media community through content creation, ads, and community engagement.
But what are some ways to increase your organic and meaningful insights in social media marketing, you need to make yourself look different and unique as compared to every other school working towards increasing their outreach and admissions through social media? Having a sound digital marketing strategy in place is one of the very first steps. But how do you make it perfect? Where should you put in that extra mile of effort to make your story and your brand stand out?
Let’s find out through some tips that can help you improve your digital marketing strategies in better ways:
Promotional vs. Informative content:
Promoting your school on social media is important, in fact, it is a major part of the purpose we engage in social media marketing. But this is not what you want to solely portray to your audience. Overtly promoting your school too much can harm your efforts of generating genuine leads.
People will trust a brand if they actually demonstrate an intention to provide them with useful resources instead of just selling them to them. Therefore, you should always keep your content informative, and interesting, content that prospective
students will enjoy and like to see and your engagement rate will increase accordingly.
To make the right balance, use the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content should be useful for your target audience, while 20% of it can be for promotional purposes.
Content variety:
Social media content is not just limited to one kind, there can be many ways to present information online through blogs, posts, live streams, videos, and infographics. The more variety you demonstrate across your platform will have a huge impact on attracting online traffic and making your channel engaging and interesting for your viewers. Good and variety content will earn you long-time followers instead of on-time viewers.
The right content for the right platform:
Every social media platform caters to different kinds of content, which tend to get popular there. While on a site like Twitter, microblogs and retweets tend to get more popular, on a site like Facebook infographics-based content tends to do well. Instagram is a perfect platform for photos and albums from daily school life as well as hashtags for your school. LinkedIn focuses more on professional assets and qualities. So you should make sure that you tailor different kinds of content that work separately for all different platforms, to make the most out of them.
Direct engagement with interactive features:
All social media sites provide loads of opportunities for direct engagement with your audience. These features are an excellent way to directly interact with your audience and build brand awareness and a good consumer base for your services.
Features like live streaming on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter polls and Instagram story features like polls and questions can help the audience directly engage with you which will be an excellent social media marketing strategy and will ensure long-term user interest and engagement.
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Share positive testimonials:
Social psychology states that people are more likely to be attracted to positive information than negative ones or even purely informative content. Testimonials add credibility to your claims. Therefore you should constantly share stories and experiences of people associated with your institution and ways in which your services and resources have impacted people in a positive manner. When your audience constantly sees such content on your channel or page, they are bound to get a good impression and build a positive opinion, not just about your words but also your actions.
Consistency is the key:
Social media algorithms love consistency, it becomes easier to promote brands that are consistent in their content delivery. It also goes well with your audience base when you post at least once a day. Even if you go for things like paid social media promotions, they will look for consistency with your content. So make sure you are ready to post often and regularly once you start. You can even use third-party apps that help you in coordinating and scheduling your social media activity.
With today’s fast-moving world where things aren’t about how and why but how to do it better, it is important for schools to adopt certain social media strategies to make their engagement on these platforms meaningful and organic. Here were some common tips that could help you add credibility and dynamicity to your content online, because you have to be on your toes and move with the changing times when it comes to the best social media marketing strategies for your school.
Read More: Tips for handling your schools’ reputation online
