TIPS FOR HANDLING YOUR SCHOOLS’ REPUTATION ONLINE: Schools run and are build on a solid reputation, whether it be a parent, looking for enrolling their child in a school or a student themselves, how the school presents its brand attributes and reputation breaks or makes it all.
Especially when it comes to managing the Social Media Reputation of your schools, there is a need to be particular and vigilant about it more than ever, because our audience here are millennials and gen-z customers who won’t be easily coerced or buy into anything less than perfect.
So now, we will be laying out certain strategies that can help you build an attractive reputation for your school, on social media and digital platforms:
Assessing your School’s Brand Reputation:
This includes surveying your current standing and reputation, this can be broken down into three parts-
- Image- This can be broken down to the first impression that people have of your school, or the first few words that they may use to describe it. These are mostly opinions formed based on overheard rumors and short-term interactions and are not detailed.
- Reputation- This refers to the school’s long term or historical view of the school’s image over time.
- Brand- This refers to the attributes that you want your school to be associated with; how is it perceived by its various stakeholders?
After you form an idea of these three components of your brand reputation, you can identify and analyze the things you want to change or areas that need improvement.
School Website management:
A school website is your front door to the world and therefore it needs to represent exactly what you want it to and at the same time, present a promising and dynamic image of your school. Here are some things you need to ensure while managing and developing your school website-
- Easy to navigate: Your school website should be highly user-friendly and easy to navigate. The home page should have all the important things like information about the school, prospectus, detailed and well-maintained brochure regarding admission procedures and fee structure as well as easy to access contact information.
- UX design: UX Design stands for user-experience design. It basically focuses on creating a design for your website that users enjoy interacting with and enhances the experience users have while they visit your website, they should find your content useful and meaningful.
- Make your motto, “mobile first”: Most users, usually students surf the internet on their mobile phones and since your target audience are most likely to be students, you should prioritize making your website mobile-user friendly, i.e., the layout of the website should be as good when accessed through a cellphone as it is with a laptop or personal computer.
- Highlight successes and information: The website should have ample of positive information about your school and should contain easily accessible links to blogs detailing the specialities of your school’s brand. Besides this there should also be displays of annual school events, statistics about your academic achievements, important awards and alumni testimonials etc.,
Pay attention to the information already available online:
Before you go ahead and try to put out a positive image of your school online, you need to look out for what is already available about your reviews, where do people go most frequently to find assessments and reviews of your school, and whether these are positive or negative.
In case there are negative reviews about your school available, you need to damage control and make sure that you try to minimize or camouflage the initial negative information with better, latest reviews to establish a positive image.
Social media engagement:
Today, what comes only second in importance to your school’s website is your engagement on Social Media Platforms. Especially with your target audience including mostly Gen-Z and Millenials, there is a very high chance that they will learn about your school through sources on social media platforms and then move on to research about your reputation and the likelihood of enrolling in your institution.
Note: Want to grow your school/preschool through School Management Software
On social media, you want a specialist team that is responsible for keeping a welcoming, upbeat presence that is aligned with current trends. Define your brand and mission, create a social media strategy, and release stories of your every success and the success of your students and alumni, and show off some school spirit. Your social media pages should be highly engaging and happening places.
We have highlighted certain points that will ensure a good head start to building your school’s personal brand and reputation online.
Social media reputation management is not a very simple task, but certainly, when done right it can be the cherry on top of the cake.
