12 Top Tips and Advice for making your Social Media more effective
Originally written on 28 May 2020 and revised in May 2023. MA offers a new Digital Dashboard for schools – see tech products below.
With over 4 billion people now using social media, many of them swiping through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram up to 40 minutes (on average) a day, it’s a simple way for schools to get their audiences engaged quickly and effectively.
Social media has become an increasing part of school communication
By this we mean schools themselves using the social media channels to communicate to their school community and beyond to their wider following. There are numerous uses for schools, which could be sharing news, celebrating achievements, networking, reaching suppliers and cleverly it’s an opportunity to continually promote the school’s brand, ethos and values.
Social media can support the brand values
It is important that we concentrate our efforts on the school brand, and how social media can subtly drip feed and promote the core school messages. It can play its communication part not only to existing parents but importantly to prospective ones.
Let’s review our Top Tips that can help you improve your social media knowledge and posting potential.
12 Social Media Top Tips:
1. Audience: Who are you talking to?
Who do you [the school] want to be talking to? It’s a really crucial question, as there is no point in attempting to talk to all, or even just one target audience, ultimately it may win you more followers, but we must question the point if they are not generating the desired outcome?
So, find out about your audience, don’t guess. It may well be there is a number of groups and targets. Create a target list you can engage with, which might start with prospective parents in the local area.
- Where are they based?
- What is there age range?
- Do they have more than one child?
- What do they earn (consider levels of disposable income)?
Consider what other local interests your targets might have, are they part of social clubs or active within local online forums?
2. Which social media platforms are best for the school?
Ask yourself 4 key questions… are your current or prospective audience on the channel? What are the goals of using the channel and how will you measure your efforts? Finally, who will create content and manage the channel? (See Top Tip 11 for help)
Having fleshed out the above questions related to your audience, below are some useful stats on the main social media platforms for schools. This could also be useful knowledge for the next school quiz!
- 1 Billion+ of monthly active users
- 500 million+ daily users
- 3% of Instagram users are females with 43.7% male
- 6 out of 10 online adults have Instagram accounts
- 30% of global audience are aged between 18 and 24
- 72% of teens use Instagram
- 200 million + visit one business profile daily
- 2.5 Billion monthly active users
- 500 million Facebook stories daily viewer
- 54% of Facebook users are Female with 46% male
- The average Facebook user has 155 friends
- 88% of online users are aged 18-29, 84% of those are aged 30-49
- Europe has 387 Million users
- There are 13.7 million users in the UK (3rd largest user after the US)
- 330 million monthly active users
- 152 million daily users
- 34% of twitter users are Female with 66% males
- There are 262 million international twitter users outside the US which equates to 79% of all twitter accounts
- Around 42% of users are on the platform daily
- 675 million total users
- 310 million monthly users
- 57% of male users and 43% female users
- 46 million students and recent college graduates
- Great Britain has 28 million+ users
- 24% of Millenials (18-24 years old) use Linkedin.
*Stats via Omnicore
3. Have a plan
Create a social media strategy, to plan what you want to achieve and when by. This enables you to understand how your social media is performing, then measure and analyse against your plan.
- Set yourself goals
- What do you want to achieve?
- What are your business objectives?
- How is social media going to help you achieve these goals?
If you need help, get in touch we can help you create a social media strategy
Take stock, review what you (the school) are currently doing on social media:
- Are you engaging with the right people?
- Is the right audience following you?
- Are you using the right platforms?
- What are our competitors doing?
- Is what you’re doing going to achieve your goals?
Need help with an audit? We can help you, get in touch to discuss
4. Be aware of the Competition – the good and not so good
What are your competitors doing? Don’t be shy to learn from others, but don’t necessarily think everything they are doing is correct.
- Do you know who your competitors are?
- Is this by area or where your school/brand sits?
- Are they being more successful than you?
- Have they always been more successful, or did they change their approach?
- Are they taking potential pupils from you?
- What platforms do they use?
- Do they post more often the same or less than you?
So, consider what content your key competitors are posting and think about how it compares and contrasts with your own content. Are there any useful tips (or bad habits) to be learnt?
5. Are people talking about the school?
Are people mentioning the school? What are they saying is it good, is it bad? Respond to everything people are saying, whether it is good or bad. Remember this is Social Engagement, we must not preach, but talk to people.
6. What are people talking about in the industry?
Get involved in these conversations, you want to be seen as an authority figure in this industry, so engage in the topics your audience cares about. Follow relevant Hashtags to help you follow key areas of interest.
7. Create your social media voice and tone – this is your brand
The way you talk and interact on social media should follow your brand guidelines. The tone and approach should mirror the principles and ethos that your brand stands for.
There are a few simple rules to follow on Social media:
- Avoid jargon where possible
- Talk from the readers perspective, make them the focus
- Don’t be sensational, avoid drama and conflict.
8. The Social Media ‘Rule of Thirds’ *
- ⅓ sharing posts to promote your school and convert readers
- ⅓ sharing posts of ideas from influencers in your industry (or like-minded contacts)
- ⅓ sharing posts of personal stories to build your brand
*Hootsuite recommendation
Why In thirds? Because it makes you more collaborative, and displays that you understand your industry. Also, you do not want to continuously push your own thoughts on people, it is good to share knowledge and understanding.
9. Respond, do not ignore
Remember this is a dialogue not a monologue. If people have taken the time to speak, you must reply in a timely fashion. This is especially important if people are asking for specific details about the school.
Don’t get into arguments if you or the school do get negative comments. Look to resolve issues, encourage people to have their own point of view and agree to disagree if you cannot come to the same outcome, but don’t avoid a healthy debate.
10. When should you post?
It will depend on the audience and what platform you are using. Don’t blanket post across all social media platforms as their audiences will be different.
There are some key times* in which there are more users on certain platforms, and these may give you a guide to start, but ultimately you should test and review as to what is best for your audience:
“Businesses can see more engagement on posts later in the week. In particular Thursdays and Fridays between 1pm and 4pm, as most desktop and mobile users browse Facebook during their ‘downtime’ during the working day. Early mornings have the least of engagement, though if your target audience commute to work, this could work in your favour.”
”Most users do so through their mobile devices, so lunchtime during the working week will see more users available, so between 11am and 1pm. If you want to try later posts between 6pm and 9pm also works well. Sunday is the least active day.”
”The algorithm they use posts the accounts you follow via a score they think will be more interesting to you, the best way to beat it is to post between 1pm and 2pm with the most active users. Engagement levels are also good between 4pm and 6pm so this would be a good time for consistent daily posts.”
*Shareable: The Social Media and Content Marketing
11. Get tech tool and/or external help to support
Use some of the great online tools available to make your life easier. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel.
MA Tip: Considering seeking help to get your social media management planned out to your goals and bring in automation to help support your ad hoc manual social media posting (see more below).
Here are some of the great tools which can be put to effective use:
- MA Digital Dashboard – An excellent online tool, providing a single calendar style dashboard interface to help create content, post it, monitor and manage all of an organisation’s social networks. The platform can send and schedule updates, monitor feeds, engage direct with posts across the channels and with powerful analytic to help review and adjust. UK developed and based. The integration product is offered by Marketing Advisers (MA) for Schools, together with additional MA services. Learn more
- SocialOomph – It does have a free plan, though admittedly with limited features. The full option offers some great individual features across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
- Later – A drag and drop calendar to help you plan and schedule Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It also tracks analytics to help you understand the best time to post.
- Lightroom – A tool to help you organise and edit photos to get the best images for your social media.
- Canva – a graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content.
(Note, this is not an exhaustive list of products)
Social media strategy setting, content prepping, on-going posting and management takes time – how can this be addressed to save in-house marketing time?
MA Advice: If you need some help to align your social media to your school’s objectives or simply struggle with time to oversee – then external support could help. Seek to establish a content and scheduling plan (update/review monthly) or the next step could be to outsource your social media together with a partner…
Consider outsourcing the function, whereby an experienced specialist can set-up and through a partnership arrangement can effectively manage the process. The local /ad hoc social posts will then be the ‘bonus content’ reporting on real-time school news.
12. Measure for success
Once you have put plans into place and you are utilising social media to your best ability, don’t forget to measure how you are doing. Review and if it is needed, adjust and change your approach.
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.
Use this measurement information to review and adjust your strategy as required. The next steps, for helping to reach the school objectives, might require you to directly advertise on Social Media.
Every school is unique
With its own story, news and brand ethos to share, this calls for social media action that will be relevant and targeted to your specific audience(s). The social media activity will need to work along side the overall digital marketing goals.
If you need help to set your social media strategy or outsourcing the function to help manage on-going please contact us.
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