Social media creates an environment where everyone is seeking audience attention. In this blog article we draw attention to 5 aspects to help spark higher levels of engagement, and why a scheduling management tool can bring about a revolutionary change.
Social media has become an essential part of school communication.
By this we mean school’s and Multi Academy Trusts (MAT’s) can use the social media channels as a way to communicate with their own community and beyond to a wider audience.
Social media marketing is a simple way for school organisations to engage their audiences quickly and effectively. However, it often takes a lot of time and effort, so it can be disappointing when your posts don’t get the reach and engagement they deserve.
What is a social media engagement?
Engagements count as comments, likes, link clicks, saves, shares or any other interaction on your posts. There are many benefits to sparking up social media engagement; it has the potential to significantly increase your reach, conversions, traffic to site and, ultimately, build deeper connections with your audience.
Social media has numerous uses for schools and trusts, with content themes such as:
- New pupil admissions
- Celebrating achievements
- Promoting events
- Networking
- Community support
- Industry discussions
- To promote brand, ethos and values.
Here are our 5 points to bring about a revitalising, maybe even revolutionary, change to your social media management:
1. Have a robust plan and know your starting point
This sounds all too obvious but surprisingly many school organisations do not have a robust plan or periodically review to know how social media is performing.
As a starter. Create a basic social media strategy (plan), to set-out what you want to achieve and by when.
For example, it might be to specifically increase a platform following or post engagement by 10% in X months. Activity which can be tracked to support the bigger picture; increasing the number of enquires to the next Open Day or winding forward the actual number of new starters.
It is crucial you know your stats and the metrics to monitor to ensure you can track progress – make sure you have conversion tracking (code) and a snapshot dashboard in place. Seek out a tech tool with dashboard analytics that can help you post, analyse, adjust and then output a monthly management report.
See point 5 for our view on what a tech scheduling tool can bring to the table.
2. Support the brand values
It is important that schools concentrate their efforts on their own brand and its uniqueness and look at how social media can subtly drip feed and promote these key school values.
Consider the Inbound marketing approach we’ve previously discussed to encourage parents to be drawn to your school. Effective use of your tailored content on the social channels can most definitely play its communication part – not only to existing parents but importantly to prospective ones.
3. Posting rules
While social media is a great platform for selling the school or trust organisation, you can’t simply allow your posting feed to be a constant stream of self-professed greatness. This is one of the most common mistakes that all organisations make. Remember, all the basic principles of marketing still apply to social media.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Molly MacArthur, Digital Marketing Manager advises that the 80/20 rule often works well.
“Roughly 80% of your social media posts should be providing real value for your audience – whether that be inspiring, educating, or entertaining content – or offering solutions to their problems. Only around 20% of posts should explicitly promote your business or products”
4. Use effective CTAs and captions
Once you’ve completed your latest review, set goals, nailed your range of content and are showing up consistently, let’s look at improving your captions and CTAs (Call-To-Action).
Social media call-out captions are often an afterthought, but if used effectively, they have the pulling power to significantly increase engagement and conversions. Plan ahead by creating your desired captions during your planning session within your content scheduling tool, remove the need to do this on-the-fly. The key to the caption will be linked to what you want to achieve and making that clear to the audience. If you want them to click the link in your bio, give their comment opinion, or share the post – do tell them! Invite your audience to act.
“Put the most important and valuable part of the caption at the beginning. Many social media platforms limit the caption characters shown, after which characters are hidden and your audience will have to click ‘More’ to read the full caption, so don’t miss the opportunity to engage straight away”.
5. Use an online tech tool as your supporting partner
Use your best fit online scheduling management tool to make your life easier. Some of these online tools are almost designed for education organisations, supporting ideation and team working, and will therefore actively support you to manage your social media processes.
What is the benefit of using a social media management tool?
A management tool can help support the creative planning process, save time for posting across channels and the analysis and reporting features will prevent you for having to continually cross reference all of your platforms. Or remove the guess work!
What online service should I be looking out for to support my social media efforts?
Think about what you want to change and improve. What will an online service bring to the party?
We can offer the following summary on what a scheduling/management tool really must achieve:
(i) Save time – The service must be able automatically publish content to all of your social media profiles from one easy-to-use intuitive platform.
(ii) Plan strategically – Use a product that has a calendar interface to drag and drop posts across all channels, this will help to organise your content based on your strategic priorities.
(iii) Inspire creativity – Look for a tech product that includes ideation tools to empower content ideas to help drive creativity.
(iv) Manage quality – Schools and trusts will almost certainly have a number of people involved in the social media process. Seek out a product that offer customised approval processes to ensure only the right content gets approved and published.
(v) Powerful analytics: Reach new audiences – The analytics and reporting features are absolutely crucial to help you understand your position and progress. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn all offer various analytical dashboards to show how you are performing from the number of followers, reach and engagement with specific posts. However, a single dashboard interface will quickly enable you to get the complete picture and will offer the best opportunity to manage, optimise and improve your social networks.
MA actionable advice:
Align your social media to your school’s objectives > review your template graphics > and save time with a content management tool.
Having reviewed the many online scheduling tools and dashboards, please talk with us for our recommendation on the best fit product for education.
The next steps.
To help the school organisation to reach wider and deeper engagement, this might require a specific campaign involving paid adverts on social media and extending into online search (Google effectively).
Get help > start small > test and build from there – working towards having a system in place that can be switched on and off as you (the school or trust) need.
If you need help to review or to set you off on your social media plans – contact us about our social media support service and subscription options.
Read about us and our unique school focused team – Marketing Advisers for Schools.