How to Promote Your School Successfully on Social Media

These days, just about everyone has a social media page. Businesses across every industry have some type of social media marketing presence. There are over 200 million businesses worldwide on Facebook alone. That doesn’t include all of the reach you can achieve from other platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Schools can use social media to promote their academic programs, attract new students, and communicate with current students as well as bolster school spirit through engagement. There are so many different ways that a social media strategy can benefit a school.

Social media may have been optional in the past. But as we approach 2023, most families expect their current or prospective school to have an active social media presence.

Why Schools Need Social Media Marketing

As a school administrator, you may be struggling to understand why social media is important in education. There are many ways a school can use social media for marketing and communication.

As most of us know, most young people are in constant communication with others via social media. A lot of their communication with others happens online. If you want to reach this demographic, the most logical place to go is where they are spending their time. Social media is a way to communicate important updates to students as well as a way to keep them engaged with current events and activities.

A recent survey found that people across all age groups spend at least an hour per day on social networks, on average. Gen Z and millennials spend 2 to 3 hours per day on social media. Those numbers indicate that it would only make sense to use social media in schools to communicate with students as well as parents.

How Your School Can Use Social Effectively

Social media marketing is a great tool for schools. Organic social media content is a low cost and effective way to inform prospective students and their families about your school culture. Posts that demonstrate school spirit and students exhibiting school values are great pieces of content.

Rocketship has had tremendous success with creating open house and admissions events on Facebook for schools. Attendees can RSVP on a Facebook post, and schools can keep track of who showed interest as well as who attends.

Facebook groups are also a great way to communicate with prospective students and parents. In these groups, parents and students can ask questions and the school can designate current students and faculty as moderators of the group to assist with answering questions. This will help develop a community before the student is even accepted into the school, which can help with the decision making process.

Social Media Marketing Strategies

While organic social media for schools is relatively easy to implement, there still should be some strategy behind the posting. Random posts to various audiences with no defined structure can result in low follower count and low engagement.

If you’re planning to start doing organic social media marketing, the first thing you should do is create an editorial calendar. This document will help you to create a posting schedule and make sure you are regularly posting different kinds of content. It’s important to post consistently, and an editorial calendar makes it so much easier to schedule content in advance. Sporadic posting is not recommended on any platform.

Paid social media is also great for schools. This strategy allows you to significantly expand your reach and better target people who aren’t following your page. A marketing agency can help you build high-converting paid social media campaigns. An experience agency or paid social media professional can often offset their fees within a few months by knowing how to optimize campaigns.

If you are not already promoting your school on social media, it’s time to get started. You can begin by posting about upcoming school events, sports teams, students showing school values, and minor holidays. For instance, did you know that February 8 is National Boy Scout Day? That might be a great day to post about your school’s Boy Scout troops!

At Rocketship, we have developed a social media calendar that lists all the minor holidays to give you some content inspiration for every season. Download it here to get started!

Download Social Media Holiday Calendar