How to Use Social Media In Schools: Getting Started

In using social media for your school in Nigeria, First things first involves you have a handle in the platform you have chosen to have an account in.

Let’s say, you have decided to create an account on Facebook. Filling every information needed on your profile is very important; about your school, its location, place in your school logo, and pictures of your students, place in the correct information, and add your website address. When you’ve created the handles or if you already have a handles on the various platforms that you want, going forward you’ll want to take not of steps I’ll be highlighting. But before then, I’ll like to state that having a website for your school is very important if you’ll be successful online. So get one if you do not have one.

Now, let’s get to the steps to succeeding on social media with your school in Nigeria, whether you’re a school owner or a social media manager for a school.

Step 1. Have a Periodic Social Media Strategy for you school.

Periodic here can be each term or semester depending on the kind of school you have. A strategy covers how you’ll be running everything that happens on your social media handle through the period you’ve set for it.

What you need to have on your social media marketing strategy for your school in Nigeria. A Goal. What exactly are you trying to achieve on social media within this period?

What do you need to achieve this? How long will it take you to achieve it? This are a few of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself. Always make sure your goal setting follow the SMART way of setting goals, and when you’re done with that, you’ll now map out a plan to achieve your goals. Create a plan. Having a social media plan is not a thing that should be up for discussion. When you have a goal, next thing to go brainstorming on is how to get your goals accomplished. For example, let’s say you want have a goal of increasing the number of new students for a new term or semester or to increase the engagement levels of parents with your handle.

The next question should be how right? First things you’ll have to take not of initially is The parent Personas. What this means is determining the kind of parent groups your school have. This helps you choose the social media platform to join. So you find the demographics of your parent group, their age-group, their motivations, goals, and Challenges. This is one of the mistakes on businesses including schools using the online space to market themselves, and having this will help you to be able to craft out quality content these parent will engage with.

A thought flashed through my mind, about how this is Nigeria, and many of this things are not important. Who cares about parent personas in Nigeria, who cares about having a strategy for social media in Nigeria? But then, since many do no care, wouldn’t caring help you standout? If you act haphazardly on social media, you’ll get a haphazard result.

Create an editorial/Content calendar

An editorial or content calendar is a document (An excel file) that’ll show all that’ll go out as content to every of your social media handles over a period of time. This helps to reduce the stress of having to think out content the morning you need to make a post. In a content calendar, you can include the following…

• The day/ date and Time
• The content you’ll be posting
• Which social media platform you’ll be posting it to.
• What hashtags you’ll include in the post.
• What links you’ll include
• Which image or video you will use, if any
• What campaign the post will be going under.

You might have different campaigns going on simultaneously, say… an awareness campaign for an upcoming event or a campaign for to educate parents on a certain thing as regards their kids. This is quite tricky, because you might be wondering what should be the duration for my editorial calendar. This should depend on you, you could go for weekly, monthly or quarterly. Whatever works for you. If your school is one that has lots of activities going on in-between that you cannot foresee at the start of whenever you create your calendar, you may want to consider a shorter calendar duration, say a month. The idea for your calendar is to help make using social media easy, sharing the valuable stuff your parent audience would find as meaningful. What to Share as content on handles.

I’ll breakdown what you can share as content into three namely… original, curated, and crowdsourced.

Original Content

This is any content that you or your social media manger produces from scratch. Could be a blog post, photos for your school, or a video of a student or teacher in the classroom. You can encourage students to write articles which you can publish as blog posts, and shared as your social media handles.

Curated Content

Curating content means to share another content created by someone else. This is fast, common and less stressful. Search out shareable content that your followers, both parents and student will find helpful (Educative, or entertaining.). Then you can include your caption to encourage comments and engagements. Be wise enough to cite where you got the content from, this will help you keep away from negative look online.

Crowdsourced Content

This involves you getting content ideas and content from your followers (Parents, Students, Teachers..).This can increase your engagement levels by a huge margin, because this kind of content comes from your followers and since they find the content relevant, they’ll gladly engage with it. You can create content with questions such as pools for students or parents…. Suggestions for how to increase productivity of the school. The content you use is as important as how successful your school will be on social media, this is why content is the most important aspect of any business.

Repurpose your content

To repurpose content is to convert it from on form to another, from text to image, to video… Use this as a strategy to boost your engagement. You can convert an article written by your writer into a video. Either recited or animated, with a voice over, remember that social media is social, so let your creativity help you come up with different ways to convert one content format to another.

Social media analytics

Learn to measure how far you’ve come to meeting your goals. Measure the important metrics and depending on what you find, be it that you’re not meeting up or that you’re on track, re-strategize to get the results you want.

Use social media and print together

Incorporate social media strategies into your live events. This should always be part of your strategy. Whatever even you’ll be holding. Make putting it on social media a part of the publicity. This shouldn’t only be for publicizing the event, even on the event day. Spread the word out on what and what is going down there.

Step 2. Create a social media policy for your school

A social media policy is a document that contains the code of conduct for your employees who make posts on social media whether on their personal handles on the school handle. Simply encouraging your staff to join in promoting your school on social media is not enough. Before doing that, it is important that have your own social media policy so that they (your staff) know what boundaries exist. The main purpose for having this policy is so that you can avoid any legal problems or public humiliation from the post from one of your staff, whether the post was made on his/her personal handle or on the school’s page. Your staff will appreciate a guideline to using social media properly, so that they always put the school in the good light. Also, make sure the person who handles your social media accounts is an expert and know what he/she is doing. Look for someone who understands what you’re looking to achieve as a school and can think up strategies to help you reach those goals.

Having a Social Media Policy for your school is important, don’t overlook it.- It will help anybody handling your accounts know how to handle them based on your needs and values and also how to handle comments, especially negative comments.

Step 3. Train your staff about social media

Get your staff equipped with adequate knowledge about social media, so they too can assist with the school new social media marketing. This will help them understand how they fit into the whole picture of the school’s social media marketing, what they are expected to and not do. This will also help them understand the school’s social media policy and when communicating with students as regards trending topics and hashtags, and also in handling their own personal handles properly. Doing this will help bring all your staff together, and this collective effort will help reach your marketing goals quickly. If you cannot carry this out yourself, get a social media expert to this for you.

Add social media posting as part of your contract when enrolling new students. This is simply offering to the parent or wards of the student that their images or videos might be posted on social media, so they can either give their consent or not. It won’t be ideal to post child’s picture online without consent by his parent. For parent’s that do not accept, what you do is left to you. You can decide to make them exceptions or not accept their kids. You can also take this opportunity to ask these parents who are enrolling their kids to follow you on your handles as a way to keep in touch.

Don’t be overly salesy. Don’t be the school always screaming about how good they are, how the environment is the most suited for a student to learn. People get bored of always seeing stuff like that. Prioritize sharing relevant stuff, and develop strong relationship, you’ll see the results of this kind of indirect selling.