Social Media For Schools

With social media now playing such a pivotal role in everyone’s lives, schools can’t ignore it. If you haven’t yet decided that Social Media is right for your school, just take a look at what your competitors are up to. Do they blog and tweet information that parents value? Do their websites include links to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter? Do they have social media links in their email signatures?

Perhaps it’s time to start improving your own school’s social media strategy.

Before you start, it’s important to be clear about your objectives. You wouldn’t dream of teaching a class without a lesson plan, so start with your audience. Do you want to connect with parents, pupils or both? Once you’re clear about who you’re targeting, you’ll be able to find out what social media sites they like to use and start there.

For example, if you want to get more parents to “like” your Facebook page, so that you can share more information about your school, you might want to learn how to send attractive messages to people in relevant Facebook categories, such as parents in a specific geographic area with children in specific age groups. If your aim is to communicate with pupils, you might decide to focus on creating really engaging content on your blog.

Whereas a typical business social media strategy might be, “from Likes to Leads to Sales”, yours could be “from Likes to Applicants to Enrolment”.

Attracting fans, followers and subscribers will enable you to develop relationships with the people who are interested in your school, so that we can share good news stories with them via social media and email marketing.

Here are a few questions to consider:
• Do you know who visits your website and social media sites?
• Do you use a well-ordered database to manage your relationships?
• Do you have a strategy for keeping in touch with news and updates?

Good luck! And if you are a social media beginner, there has never been a more important time to get online and start the ball rolling.