Social media websites have become the primary source of information about any place or person. This means that if someone is curious about, say your school, their first step would be to find it on social media. Social media marketing for schools helps you to attract such curious minds to your institution and increase your profits.
While tools like school ERP software help in marketing your school through the school website, you will also need to focus on social media to ensure that you reach your target audience and engage with them in real-time.
In the age of web 2.0, if your school is not on social media, people will choose the ones that have active social media accounts. Even if you are giving exceptional facilities to your students, they will be of no use if the prospective students and their families do not know about them.
Hence, it becomes imperative for all educational institutions to have a robust presence on social media platforms. This blog will look at the top tips to make your educational institution popular on social media using social media marketing for schools.
Is Social Media Marketing for Schools Necessary?
As the pandemic swept us, many things that traditionally ran offline found a place in the virtual world, and that includes schools and other educational institutions. This also means that while looking for a school to admit their child to, parents will not be going around visiting one school to other schools like they usually did.
The current best option to know what the school is like is to check the educational institution’s social media pages.
As you may already know, social media offers a two-way communication platform. This means that parents can not only see what the school is posting on social media but also what others are saying about the school in their reviews or comments. This gives parents and students a fair idea of what to expect from your school.
So, when so much is dependent on your school’s social media, you cannot afford to keep it bland or inactive. You need to buck up your social media game and attract students and parents to your school facility.
Here are some top tips that can help you make your school popular on social media.
Create Engaging Posts
Social media marketing for schools is all about encouraging your audience to interact with you through your posts and activities on social media. Hence, making posts that motivate people to engage with your school humanizes your school.
Engaging with prospective students and parents will also help you understand what they look for in their ideal school. Accordingly, you can make changes to your school system that can attract more students and parents to your school.
Some of the simple ways to motivate engagement are to ask questions, ask for audience opinion, or host a content/quiz.
Another thing you may share is the success stories of your school students and alumni. This will also increase the prospect’s confidence in your school. This can give them an extra push into enrolling in your program.
Make Use of Videos
Videos are one of the most engaging content formats on social media. They make a big part of social media marketing for schools. With short videos lining up on almost every social media platform, the 15-20 second booster content makes up a great way to attract attention and leave an impact.
Showcase your campus for prospective students and parents so that they can get familiar with it even before attending an open house. You can use the short video formats to tell what courses you offer, or what makes your institution different from others.
There are many other ideas that you can use to create videos for your educational institute. For example, you can keep a video of events that your school organizes, whether indoors or outdoors.
Leverage User-Generated Content
User-generated content is the vote of confidence that your followers, your student, or staff show on social media. You can reshare such content on your account to show your followers or non-followers how fun, interesting, and helpful your school is to its students and staff.
Find images and videos tagged with your institute’s location and curate them to share the best ones on your account. Be sure to ask for permission and give credit to the person whose post you are resharing.
People sharing their happy memories at your school is positive visual feedback or review your school receives on social media. These reviews further boost the confidence of students and parents that are looking to enroll their child in your school.
Share Information Relating to Curriculum and Other Activities
While social media is a great way to attract new candidates to your school, it is also an amazing way to keep your current students engaged with your school and all its activities.
Hence, social media can also act as a public notice board for your school. Notices for when the admissions open, student placement programs, teacher recruitment announcements, etc. can also be promoted using social media.
Similarly, college fests and events where you want people outside your school to come and experience life at your campus can be promoted using social media as well.
Again, try to make your posts engaging with great graphics and content.
Run Social Media Advertisement
Trying to gain a higher reach on social media organically is like running a race against the algorithm put in place on every platform. You can never win!
To reach out to your target audience more effectively, you need to run advertisements on social media platforms.
The most popular social media advertising host is Facebook Ads that allows you to advertise your school on Facebook as well as on Instagram. For YouTube, you can use Google Ads to target your ideal audience based on factors like interests, demographics, location, gender, occupation, etc.
These accurate targeting options make it easy for you to showcase your social media content to the right audience. Social media advertising is way cheaper than any other form of traditional advertising.
However, you need to be sure about whom you want to target. You can take help from a digital marketing agency to create a highly converting ad campaign for your school. They can understand your marketing goals and create social media ad campaigns that help you achieve them.
FAQs
Why is Social Media Marketing for Schools Important?
Just like any other business organization, schools too will only run smoothly when they have a good ratio of admissions to graduations. That being said, there are other reasons why social media marketing for schools is important. For example, it allows your current students and alumni to stay connected, engages your students and their parents, and allows you to provide them with all the important school-related announcements.
How do Schools Use Social Media Marketing?
The above techniques can be easily used for marketing your school on different social media platforms. They will allow you to get new content ideas regularly for your school’s social media.
Summary
Social media marketing for schools is all about what your students and prospects want to know about your school. It may include your school curriculum, students, faculty, campus, achievements, campus life, alumni, and similar other things.
If you follow the above-discussed tips to create a social media marketing strategy for your school, it will substantially improve your engagement with the students and increase the number of interested candidates for your annual school enrollment.
These tips are:
- Create engaging posts
- Make use of videos
- Leverage user-generated content
- Share information relating to curriculum and other activities
- Run social media advertisement
With the school management software, you can manage your school’s marketing on other digital fronts with solutions like website and SMS/messenger integration. So, marketing your school on social media along with the school ERP software will ensure that you have multifaceted promotional efforts.
Tell us how else would you use social media marketing for schools? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
