Why Your School Needs Social Media

Why does my school need social media? Social media platforms are one of the most effective FREE ways to communicate about your school or educational institution. Don’t have much marketing budget? No problem. By utilising Facebook, Instagram and Twitter effectively, you can market your school to a whole new audience (as well as your current community) without spending a nickel. Here’s how you do it.

Planning Your Social Media. 

If you use social media in your personal life, it can seem all too simple to rush in and set up accounts for your school or business – but to ensure that everything is as coordinated as possible, sit down and think about it. Do you want all your platform handles to be consistent? Would you like to use a hashtag on all your posts? What are other similar schools doing? (Not sure what that means, check out our post on Social Media Lingo).

Your School’s Social Media Presence

The first step is to establish your handle – this is something that would be included in your URL for each social media network and what would be used for people to tag your page. Come up with a few suggestions and then run them past someone to ensure they don’t have the potential to be misconstrued. Ours is @digitisemyschool (Find us on Facebook here and Instagram here), which conveys what the page does and is, instantly understood.

We’d suggest including the location in your handle to avoid confusion – for example @YourSchoolLDN or @LDNschool – if your school was in London. 

Once you’ve confirmed this, check to make sure it’s available across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You may need to try a few variations – but try to avoid using any underscores or special characters if possible. 

Which Social Media Do I Want?

When there is a platform for everything, it can be overwhelming – we’d suggest starting off with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to start.

Facebook is best for sharing a mix of images, videos and links. The average audience of Facebook is 35+ so this would be perfect for connecting with your student’s parents, guardians and even grandparents.

Twitter is popular amongst the millennial generation (24+), so this is a good network to engage with older students or alumni. Twitter is great for sharing bite sized snippets of text, image insights and short videos.

Instagram has the widest age demographic but appeals mostly to under 24’s – however it does depend on the country you’re in so do a bit of research. Instagram can be used as a visual portfolio for your school – but you aren’t able to share links on a normal post.

So, what next? 

Check out our below posts on getting everything started:

Setting up your school’s Instagram Page | Setting up your school’s Facebook Page | Setting up your school’s Twitter Page