Have you tried these 6 things?
We often get asked “how do we improve our social media marketing?”. And it isn’t so simple to reply! There are lot’s of ways you can make improvements, and a lot will be specific to your school.
However, here are 6 things that you might not have thought to do yet.
1. Create a dedicated interest-based account?
There will be lots of stories happening at your school. And these will be happening in different areas of the school. Unfortunately, you can’t be everywhere!
For example, there will not be a lack of sports stories to share. A dedicated sports account will your community to follow this account, should they be interested in sport at the school. This will be an account with real focus.
This will also help feed into the main school Twitter feed - you will simply retweet the most newsworthy tweets.
These ‘interest based’ sub-accounts work tremendously well for schools. People will enjoy following a dedicated account that they are interested in, and it will take pressure off the person running the main account, as the teachers will be capturing and sharing stories!
Some ideas:
- Sports
- Art
- Boarding
- Music
- Trips
- English
- Science
2. Reserve your brand name across all social channels?
Your social name is like your new www. domain name. It is essential that it is reserved across all social channels. Even if you do not plan on using it yet, reserve it!
Read our blog post on naming your social media channels:
http://schoolbyt.es/naming-your-social-media-channels
3. Use Vine to share short 6 second clips of ‘Life At The School’?
Vine can be used to show a snapshot of life at the school - in 6 seconds! The videos are natively embedded into tweets, and can be embedded into your news articles.
Stop-motion animation can be achieved through the use of Vine. This can bring up some creative videos.
4. Use Instagram to share glimpses of life at the school?
Instagram is currently one of the most popular social media channels, at the moment. It has more users than Twitter, and should not be overlooked.
In fact, it is very easy to use and create content for. Instagram does not need a constant stream of posts - just one photo a day is enough.
An option is to take 7 photos Monday morning, and this gives you a photo to share each day for a whole week.
Instagram is great for building awareness and loyalty
5. Embedding social into your news/website?
Social content can easily be embedded into news articles. Content such as tweets, YouTube videos, Vines, Instagram photos etc. can all be embedded into your website.
News would be a great place to show more content for a particular article. This will not only add more depth to your news article, but also encourage people to explore your social content.
6. Use your own branded bit.ly URLs for social links?
Using bit.ly allows you to share and track shortened URLs on social media, websites, and even offline. There is an option to create custom, branded bit.ly links that are more personalised.
Use domai.nr to search variants of your brand name, to get shortened versions. You can then use the service to register the domain.
Are you going to try out any of these tips? Do you already do any of them? Let us know on Twitter @intSchools.