Nettie Reynolds
Content Manager, Community Brands
One marketing challenge independent schools face is how to attract new students and families to their school. Communities often can have more than one independent school for families to consider and schools are now utilizing social media more and more to attract new students.
Here are four ways your school can use social media to market your school to the community and raise the visibility of your school overall.
1. Highlight your school’s unique achievements
Create a calendar to plan for posts throughout the month where your school highlights academic wins and scholarships, community events, art accomplishments, sporting events, and more. Make sure these posts have variety (e.g., not just when the football team wins a game) and highlight the unique accomplishments of all your different kinds of students.
2. Showcase your school culture
Prospective parents and students want to know what it will be like to attend your school every day. Your social media messaging should convey the guiding beliefs and values that illustrate how your educational institution operates and what makes it different from others. While this information should be prominent in your marketing materials, you should also invite students and their families to visit during school hours to sample it for themselves. Make sure you post open house information on all your social media channels.
3. Engage
Social media is more than just a channel for pushing out your content—it is a great forum for two-way engagement. Be responsive to questions and comments posted on your social media. Sometimes this means answering questions on public posts or providing customer service through private/direct message. Providing timely responses (within 24 hours) on social media reinforces your loyalty to your community and provides a positive experience for prospects and current families alike.
4. Consider upping your investment
Most social media platforms have the option for boosted posts or paid advertising to help you reach a larger audience. Investing in paid social media helps ensure that your content appears in the feeds of your target audience, above and beyond just your followers. You determine how much you want to spend and who your content should be marketed to in order to achieve your desired results. Spending money to get more eyes on your content, especially during application season, could have a significant return on investment.
Finally, don’t forget to review the analytics behind your social media efforts. You’ll want to examine what types of content resonate with your audience, what time of day posts get the most engagement, and the sentiment of the people responding to your content. All this data can help you make informed decisions about future social media endeavors.
Learn more ways to attract new students and families to your school through our on-demand webinar, Optimize Your Acquisition Strategy for Long-term Growth.
