Most, if not all, schools are using social media channels as a major part of their digital marketing strategy. It’s easy to see the advantages of social media marketing; many school marketers recognize the potential for growth using social networks.
There are many advantages of using a social media marketing strategy.
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Affordability
Traditional marketing channels, such as radio, television, or printed advertisements, can be expensive for schools. While social media marketing isn’t totally without cost, it is still much less costly than most other types of conventional marketing.
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Large audiences
When you advertise on a website or in a printed publication, such as a magazine, you have a limited audience. But social channels offer access to large audiences, who can choose to follow your school.
Here are the numbers of users as of January 2021 (Statista)
- Facebook – 2.7 billion
- YouTube – 2.3 billion
- Instagram – 1.2 billion
- TikTok – 689 million
- Snapchat – 498 million
- Pinterest – 442 million
- Twitter – 353 million
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Immediate publishing
Schools can publish content on social media whenever they are ready. Traditional publications, such as magazines, can take weeks or months to publish content.
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Engagement
Social media allows schools to engage with their audience. You can ask questions, invite followers to upload user-generated content, respond to questions, comments, or complaints.
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Loyalty
When parents feel they have a way that is easy for them to ask questions and express concerns, they feel you genuinely care about their needs and opinions; they become more loyal to your school.
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Drive traffic
Social media marketing drives traffic to your website. You can use social media posts to publish blog posts and other content with links to your website or landing page.
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Stay top of mind
Social media helps your school stay in front of your followers. Many people check into their social media accounts at least once a day, so it makes sense to continually publish new content each day so your school will come to mind when the family is ready to consider submitting an inquiry or application.
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Access to paid advertising
Social media offers paid advertising opportunities to go beyond organic posting. Since each social media platform offers a different type of advertising capability, the type and targeting may vary.
Paid advertising offers schools the opportunity to get information about your school in front of potential families that haven’t found your school yet. Hopefully, those ads will help increase the number of inquiries that are submitted.
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Improve performance
Social media platforms make it easy to track the performance of your marketing campaigns. You can track social media metrics, such as posts, comments, likes, shares, and more. You can also get metric information on advertising campaigns as well, such as impressions, clicks, and conversions. When you are able to track metric data, you can use that information to optimize and improve it to drive better results.
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Valuable insights
Social media also offers valuable information about your audiences to help you make better marketing decisions. For example, you can use social listening tools to track and respond to people who are talking about your school on social media. With social listening, you can uncover conversations about your school and the questions people are asking, giving you more insight into the information they need.
The advantages of social media marketing for your school are great. It’s a great way to reach your audience and help them learn about your school and how well their family fits with your mission. If your school isn’t already using social media channels for marketing, take a look at each network and determine which ones make sense for your marketing strategy. Prioritize consistent updating will lead to increased awareness for your school and traffic to your website/blog.
