The Implementation Of Social Media In School

Almost everybody is on social media, from your students to their parents and the staff in your school. It’s past time for you to take your school online. I assure you that over 95% of the students in your school are on social media. Except of course your school is a Nursery and Primary school, but still at that majority of their parents are on social media.

It’s a huge step taking the marketing of a school with social media, with a couple of school authorities concerned about the protection of their students, the school name and a couple other things. A lot of them are willing to take the risk. But the benefit of using social media to promote your school outweighs the risks. And with proper planning and strategizing, these risk can reduced.

Here’s a list of the benefits of using social media for promoting your school

• Better-quality communications with parents.
• Two-way dialogue with parents to improve student outcomes. Having social media handles, and effective using them will help increase the quality of communications your school has with parents and also with students (depending on their age). It’s well known that for the child to learn well, there is a need for parental involvement. Using social media to effectively strategize communicating with parents so as to give them enlightening ways so as to support student learning. With the opportunity of getting instant feedbacks from the parents.
• You can create a private parents’ group for your school and share information with only the parents of students in the school. It also allows for easy broadcast of schools news and updates. For example: “the school is closed due to bad weather” can be sent out as one message to thousands of people, saving the time and the expense of letters and phone calls.
• Social media allows schools to communicate in a much more efficient, effective and time sensitive manner. By having a profile on different social media platforms, stakeholders can communicate with your school whenever, wherever and however best suits them.
• Improved internal communications among staff and students.
• Parent/student engagement and reaching new audiences.
• If you’re looking to getting new students enrolled into your school, social media is a very effective way to do that.
• Building a stronger school community.
• A peculiar thing about social media is the community nature it brings. Almost all industry segments have thriving segments on it. And schools are not left out. The main thing about community is relationships, and you can create a strong community of parents, teachers and schools. Plus students and Alumni. This helps to boost the relationship important to help you school flourish.
• Bigger or better public profile for your school (building public awareness of your achievements, successes and specialisms) Ability to monitor and manage your school's reputation.
• There’s only one way to manage your online reputation and that is to be online. This gives you an opportunity to build a strong awareness of what you stand for, your values and achievements.

Effective targeting on different social media platforms

Which social media platform should we be on? This is a common question we are asked when working with schools on their social media presence. Choosing the right platform(s) and sharing the right kind of content can help you effectively target different stakeholder groups for better results.

The platforms you decide to use should depend on who you want to engage with, and where those people are. For example, you could use Facebook to engage with parents (and share information about school news and successes) and for business engagement (and share information about venue hire and sponsorship opportunities).As a general rule of thumb, it is much better to create a profile on one or two platforms and ensure that communication and engagement is regular and constant than to create four or five platforms and quickly realize that you do not have the capacity to maintain such platforms.

Best social media for schools in Nigeria

I can’t say there is one best social media platform best suited for a Nigerian school, but there is one way to find out which platforms will the most product for you to be in. And that is to find out the platforms that both the parents and students are most active on. When you find that out, you then create an account on the platforms and join them.

The idea for going on social media is to connect with parent, both current and potential parents, then it is not wise to have an account in the platform where these parents do not have an account on. You can achieve this by carrying out a survey or interviews on your current parents, ask them what social media platforms they use plus when they are mostly active on the platforms. You could also find out what kinds of content they’d love to see.

If I were to give possible platforms that I think you can join in promoting your school. I’d say Facebook (because this is the largest of all platforms, and it has almost all categories of people with accounts on it). LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter (YouTube, depending on your budget….this can be a great platform for engagement).