Watch this video tutorial on the importance of using hashtags to connect to people, learn about new ideas in marketing your school, and especially helpful when connecting to other attendees at an event or conference (if there is an official hashtag for the event . . . a strong recommendation!)
Does your school have a visual content strategy? Learn why you need one and some of the reasons it is important when dealing with Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.
Review our podcast in iTunes – your positive feedback tells other school marketing, admission and communication professionals that this is worth their time (remember, most podcast episodes are only 14 min and 29 seconds long!)
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Does your school have a visual content strategy? Nowadays, you are probably aware that the social world is heavily focused on the “visual” representation of the events of your school. Are you using Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Facbeook photos, or Twitter pics to showcase all the events at your school?
Besides just snapping photos, your school must have a visual content strategy in order to optimize the use of pictures. Your families (current and prospective) are very visual and the integrated world of social media is highly visual. How visual is your online content? In a recent guest article on a nationally-recognized small business forum, I was invited to share the important elements of having a visual content strategy. I think you can easily make the translation to having a visual marketing strategy for your school.
This presentation (“Courting Admissions’ Target Market in Today’s Ever-Changing Online Scene”) is well worth your time – 3 warnings before watching:
75 is super fast – not the highway speed, but it’s 75 minutes that’s over with before you know it – hang on!
Your head will spin – Brendan Schneider and Travis Warren share a flood of information that will have you thinking, googling and wanting to learn more and do things better!
Get smart – spending this hour with Brendan and Travis will allow you to walk in to your head of school, board meeting or marketing committee and seem like the smartest person in the room!
While I’ve written many times that “content is king”, I think the important distinction is that “shareable content is king.” In our cluttered world, there’s a lot of content out there in our news feed, in our news stream, on our pin boards, and in our email inboxes. But often it is nothing by noise, spam, or just irrelevant chatter in our digital mailboxes. The foundation of a solid social media system for your school is to connect relevant content with the right audience who will pass it on to others with a similar need.
Put a link to this article in your school’s email marketing newsletter (where you hopefully have numerous prospective families on the list)
As a follow-up to a family who came for a tour, you can email them links to articles that speak specifically to each family’s concerns
Pin your article to a parent-related board on Pinterest
Shareable content is highly-relevant information that your audience has asked you for or that you know they need to understand it. Shareable content cuts through the clutter in our world and resonates with the needs of your immediate audience, and then they share it with others who have a similar need.
FINAL TIP: Writing shareable content for your families may force you to think differently about your intended audience. While current families may be the first to read your article, your final destination is really the laptop of the prospective family who currently has a friend whose kids are enrolled at your school. Armed with the right kind of relevant content, your current families become ambassadors who can passively promote your school by passing a link to a friend via email, Twitter or Facebook. For example, highly shareable content may be “How the class size at my son’s school increased his grades from Cs to all As!” or “How a smaller classroom environment has turned my wallflower daughter into a social butterfly.” Current families read (and maybe write) this content and then stand positioned to post such insights all over Facebook, Twitter and on their Pinterest board about their kids’ school.
ACTION: If you need ideas on setting up your school’s social media system, contact us for your FREE 30-minute phone consultation. No obligation to sign up for anything – just an opportunity for us to listen to your needs, share ideas and help you lay out a plan that will work for you.
