While many schools and educational institutions use social media as an avenue to interact and communicate with their students and their parents, others are using it to recruit potential students and increase their enrollment rate. Why not? Compared to traditional marketing techniques, social media is cheaper to maintain and have bigger reach. Let’s accept the fact that traditional marketing like print ads, billboards and the like are too expensive and their results are not measurable.
This is why more and more educational institutions employ social media strategists and managers to help improve their online presence. If your school do not currently have any social media pages yet, TODAY is the best time to start one. We suggest that you follow the social media strategies we have outlined below.
Be Professional
Set up your school’s page in a professional way. Since social media sites rely mostly on visual cues, make sure that your page’s profile picture and cover photos are in the right dimension. Fill in all the necessary information and make sure that your page description embodies the true values of your institution. Communicate in a professional manner all the time.
Be Fun
While your social media page is an avenue to communicate with students, potential students and their parents it doesn’t have to be boring. Remember if you are going to establish a good following on social media, you must post updates that would grab the attention of your followers. A good interaction between you and the students is measurable through comments, likes, retweets etc.
Some good updates to posts include: photos of recent school activities and gatherings (featuring students and their parents), pictures with quotes about success and education, big news about improvements of school facilities. Bad examples of posts include: calling out and tagging unruly students, tuition fee increase (this is best communicated personally).
Content is king
Your school’s social media pages are great tools to connect with students, parents and applicants. Use these platforms to your advantage. If your school already has a website share your content on your social media accounts frequently. This way, new applicants, parents and students are well aware of the things that are going on in your school like: your school’s achievements and how student life is like in your school. Keep your followers in the loop and encourage them to share your content, this way your referral traffic increases as well.
Social Media Management Takes a lot of Time
If you are the school owner, you probably want to delegate the social media management task to someone else so you can focus on more important things. While you’d probably want to pass this task to a random team member, note that social media management can be daunting. You want to give this task to someone who is already familiar with different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube etc.
If your team members or faculty are all too busy or are not very familiar with these platforms, delegate it to a social media specialist. A word of caution, if you decide to outsource this task make sure that you review their work from time to time to ensure that the quality and content of their posts are what you expect it to be.
Social Media is Evolving
Like many communication tools, social media is also evolving. Today, it’s the most popular means of communication and we’ll never know if it’s still going to be in the next few years. Expect new feature, platforms and trends to come out and be ready to assess if it’s going to benefit your school or not.