Mastering the #BrandedHasthag
Schools’ marketers will be well aware that #Hashtags are the bread and butter of making your stories discoverable for your various audiences and stakeholder groups. For storytellers themselves, these are the tools that allow for stories to be organised; and for your school’s audiences, they help families to filter the stories that they are most interested in.
Using something like #OxfordPrivateSchool may help a school to be more easily available to prospective parents in the local market, while #ProudTeacher’ might help those prospective parents understand the values of a school. But that can’t be the only use of a Hashtag, can it?
Absolutely not! At Interactive Schools, we understand that the value of hashtagging goes beyond increasing the discoverability of social media stories, and actually allows for a system of curation and organisation, both within the social channel and within the architecture of our Websites.
With every school that we work with, we devise a #HashtagStrategy, which centres on the three elements of every school that make them unique: People, Place and Purpose - Who is the story about, What are they doing and Why are they doing that?
#People
Our #People hashtags relate to those who are involved in the story that is being told, for example: #YourSchoolYear4 or #YourSchoolGrade3
These also may be Houses, either pastoral or boarding, as they identify who the story is being told about. They may also be used more broadly, to cover sections of a school (#YourSchoolMiddleSchool) or other groups within the community (#YourSchoolFaculty).
Our friends at Florida’s The Out-of-Door Academy are also using a People-based #HashtagStrategy to curate stories around the incredible wildlife they have on their campuses, using #ODA_Wildlife!
#Place
While these #Hashtags do not necessarily relate to a location within the School, they are used to curate subject, sport or activity-specific stories: they tell audiences what is happening in the story. For example, we may use #YourSchoolEnglish to curate stories shared by or about the English Department. We may use #YourSchoolFootball to curate football-specific stories or #YourSchoolDance to organise stories around Dance.
#Purpose
These are the #Hashtags that cover your school’s values, they demonstrate your reasoning behind everything you do at your school. In our recent blog, we looked at the importance of meaningful demonstrations of your values, so do check that out for more on living in to your school’s values. While these may be difficult to visualise, it is important to use the Purpose #Hashtags as parents want to know what is being instilled in their children. It’s important, also, to share creative demonstrations of your school’s values: for example, try demonstrating creativity in academic subjects, problem-solving in activities and resilience in the Arts.
Why Use A #BrandedHashtag?
In using an unbranded #Hashtag like #Biology, your story will contribute to a world-wide collection of stories containing the same tag. As of March 2024, Instagram has more than a billion uses of #Art, so your story is likely to get lost amongst them all. Instead, using a #BrandedHashtag, however, and attributing those elements, like Art, back to your school, helps to curate content, due to the reduced use of those #Hashtags.
| Unbranded | Branded |
|---|---|
| #Biology: 6 Million+ Posts | #QASBiology: 21 Posts |
| #Art: 1 billion+ Posts | #MonktonArt: 21 Posts |
| #Sport: 124 Million+ Posts | #ShiplakeSport: 115 Posts |