Social Media For Schools: The Golden Rules

 


Author: Heather Palacios, Digital Marketer at Apptegy

                                                                     




                         Every school district has their own unique goals for social media. You may be trying to grow brand awareness or increase traffic to your website. Maybe your focus is building relationships with current and prospective families and teachers in your community. Whatever your goals may be, we’ve found that there are a few social media best practices that every school district should stick to. We call them The Golden Rules of Social Media. Let’s dig in.

Stay Consistent

You might feel like you’re saying and doing the same thing over and over again, but a vital part of social media for schools is maintaining consistency. Consistency generates more traffic to your website, builds relationships, and increases recognition and affinity for your district’s brand as a whole. 

Staying consistent in social media can sound a bit ambiguous, so let's break it down. Social media consistency means:

1.    Sticking to Your Brand Style Guide
Your logos, color palette, font choice, and photo and video editing quality should all have the same look and feel every time you create a post. When someone sees your post pop up in their news feed, they should be able to easily identify your brand by your visuals alone.

2.    Maintain Posting Frequency
Studies show that you should be posting on all platforms at least once per day. While that number varies by platform, it’s safe to say that however many times you choose to post should be the number you stick to. That’s where consistency comes into play. If your Instagram followers are used to hearing from you five times a week—and for whatever reason, you lose momentum and dip down to two times a week—you’ll see a noticeable drop in your engagement rate and followers.
 

3.    Using the Same Core Hashtags
We’ve all seen posts where a person uses 50 different hashtags in one caption. While this might initially boost the post’s reach, this approach doesn’t capture the attention of your core audience—namely families and teachers in your district and larger community. 

Hashtag consistency means honing in on three to five hashtags that capture the essence of your school district. You should always have a school name hashtag. For example: #AdavilleSchoolDistrict, or an abbreviated version like #ASD. The rest of your hashtags should center around your core message or slogan. For example: #AdavilleProud or #AdavilleExcellence. When you reinforce your core hashtags, your school community will pick up on them and use them in their posts. It’s an easy way to build momentum and reach.



Content Variety

Once you have a framework in place for consistency, you need to consider how you’re sharing your content. For schools, this means distributing a wide range of social media content for the purpose of reaching all of your target audiences. Content is the only part of your school’s social media strategy that shouldn’t be consistent. 

Take Facebook, for example. Your audience on Facebook probably consists of several different demographics, like faculty, teachers, families, and community leaders. What might appeal to families—like a post about what the cafeteria is serving for lunch this week—won’t appeal to the community leaders following your page. They may be more interested in school performance ratings and news about how your district is giving back to the city. 

Remember, content variety is more than what you say. It’s about the way you say and deliver it. That means changing up your method of sharing and distributing content. You should strive to share an even blend of posts, stories, live videos, polls, and more every month. 

Additionally, it’s important to incorporate a variety of creative assets into your editorial calendar. That means photography, graphics, video, and even gifs should all be a part of your monthly social plan. It might be tempting to fall back on “quick” forms of content, like tweeting the scores of last night’s football game. But long-form content, like a 30-second video about a new school program, is just as vital for keeping users engaged. 

After talking with several school leaders, we’ve found that a major pain point in social media marketing for schools is coming up with fresh, unique content to share. And while every school is different, we recommend posting a variety of content around these topics:

1.    School Life
School life content should give prospective students, parents, and teachers a peek inside the walls of your school and programs. If you could take parents, students, and teachers on a tour of your school, what would you show them? That’s the kind of school life content you should post on social media.

2.    Culture & Values
It’s important for current and future students, parents, and teachers to not only understand who you are but why you are. Creating a hashtag for one of your core values is an easy way to reinforce and instill them into your school community. For example, if one of your values is “going the extra mile”, turn it into a hashtag and use any time one of your students or teachers is #GoingTheExtraMile.

3.    Academic Excellence
Humbly bragging about your students’ academic achievements is an easy way to turn heads in the community and attract more students and teachers to your district. Think academic awards, ACT averages, graduation rates, specialized learning options, etc.

4.    Teacher & Staff Appreciation Posts
Don’t wait until Teacher Appreciation week to show some love to teachers and faculty. We’ve found that teacher appreciation posts tend to garner more social engagement than other forms of content.

5.    Community Life
If you want to expand your audience to students, parents and teachers in surrounding districts, you need to talk about your city. Remember, some of your online audience consists of parents who are willing to move to a whole new city for the sake of their child’s education. Show them that your district isn’t just a great place to go to school—it’s a great place to live.

6.     News
Social media has always been about sharing good (and sometimes bad) news online. You can share bite-sized information from your district newsletter, or respond to events, like education policy changes. When in doubt, share good news instead of bad news—like game wins, regional competitions, and academic achievements.

7.    Real-time Content
Real-time content is about capturing, commentating, or communicating a moment as it’s happening around you and sharing it with your followers instantaneously. Real-time content skyrockets engagement metrics because it positions your brand as intelligent, active, and up-to-date with emerging stories, trends, and news.

 

Whether you’re a seasoned veteran of social media, or just getting started, these golden rules can help lay the foundation for your school’s social media strategy. At the end of the day, a strong social media presence boils down to two things: 

●        Maintaining consistency with your brand identity, post frequency, tone of voice, and hashtags.

●        Posting a wide variety of content to each of your social media channels in order to reach all of your target audiences. 

By utilizing these best practices, you’ll see your engagement metrics grow over time. But remember, social media is first and foremost a place for fostering relationships with your community. When you approach every post and conversation as an opportunity to create a memorable experience with your audience, you won’t just grow your following. You’ll also build deeper connections with your audience—and those connections can turn someone who feels neutral about your brand into a powerful advocate for your schools.



About Apptegy

Apptegy enables school leaders to compete for the attention of their audience through improved engagement, branding and listening. Our platform, Thrillshare, gives leaders, support staff, and professional communicators tools of the same quality and power that private companies enjoy every day—without added work for your team. From one platform, you can change how your community, parents, teachers, and staff think and feel about you and your schools. Make your workload feel smaller while expanding your reach and your influence.


Contact Apptegy:


Sales: 501-222-3447

Support: 501-613-0370
























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