Developing a social media strategy for companies and organisations within the education sector can be a challenging task, but it is a vital one, nonetheless.
A strong social media strategy can help you engage with key stakeholders on a regular basis, or put your organisation front and centre of the feed of potential recruits, fundraisers and partners. Social Admissions Report, 63% of students use social media to research universities and collesge, highlighting the importance of a robust social media presence.
But what might capture the attention of a partnerships manager at a corporate firm might not have the same impact on a student that is deciding on what university they want to apply for, or for the teacher who is trying to find the best resource or platform to boost their lessons.
Regardless of your audience, building a best-in-class social media strategy rests on several key cornerstones that you should be considering. How many of the below do you currently incorporate into your social media strategy?
Content, Content, Content
Where Blair spoke of “Education, Education, Education”, as a team of Social specialists we speak of “content, content, content”. Without it, you’ll struggle to meet your social objectives. By content, we don’t mean posting for posting’s sake: a nuanced, thought-out approach is required that takes into account the platform you’re posting on, the audience you’re trying to reach and the assets you have at your disposal.
That white-paper document that might attract a senior stakeholder on LinkedIn will not make cut-through with younger audiences on TikTok. To that end, a personalised approach is required – build your content strategy around the platform and its audience, whether that be video-first on Instagram and TikTok, or longer-form content on LinkedIn.
Getting your content spot on can lead to a very virtuous cycle: strong, consistent content equals strong, consistent engagement, which improves feed visibility, which engages new audiences, and so on.
Paid Social
Whilst the ongoing debate around paying for your education rages on in the UK, when it comes to social media, there’s no escaping the benefits of paying for your content to be amplified. That’s a crude way of saying that a successful paid social can work wonders for your education organisation, propelling your content to target audiences and driving bottom-funnel action from them that can be so crucial to your wider marketing strategy. We deploy paid social strategies for our education clients at PHA focussed on a variety of objectives, ranging from brand awareness all the way through to lead and traffic generation.
Think about your core marketing objectives when it comes to building your paid strategy: if fundraising and attracting investment is key, you might want to run lead-gen programmes on the likes of LinkedIn. If your brief is to engage young audiences and attract them to your platform, then brand awareness and consideration campaigns might be the way to go. Either way, we have the in-house expertise required to set you on the right path with paid social.
Community Building
There’s no better place than social media to build and nurture a community consisting of your target audience and their like-minded peers. What’s important to consider is the need to diversify your communities across the platforms your organisation is active on.
We manage communities of ambassadors for one education-based client, whilst for another we’re focussed on building positive perceptions with media and influencer communities. Developing strong brand advocates through effective community management can have an untold positive impact on your social strategy – helping you to amplify content and extend your audience reach, unlock networks you previously didn’t have access to, or increase that priceless positive sentiment that is so crucial within the education sector.
Collaboration is Key
When it comes to planning ahead, creating content and maximising what you have at your disposal to generate visibility, collaboration between social team and organisation is key. Whenever we start work with our clients in the education space, we are transparent from the get-go: we’re the social media experts and can elevate your organisation, you’re the education and content experts and so we need you to help get us there.
Working in a sector where there’s so many wheels spinning, from events to open days to whitepapers and reports to funding milestones, results day and wider news agenda moments, it is vital that communication between us is perfect.
We stress the need to plan and prepare for major moments in the calendar, whilst also being positioned to react to sector news, company announcements and other reactive content.
Collaboration can take many forms, but we advocate for regular content planning sessions, strategy check-ins, and inviting as many people across the organisation as needed to engage us on content hooks, contributions and approaches. Without such collaboration, we’re shooting in the dark and that can mean that the above pillars – from community building through to content strategy – struggle to perform as we need them to.
If you would like to discuss a social media strategy for your organisation, get in touch with our Digital team today to discuss further.