Social media ideas for schools
If you are managing social media for schools - one of your main tasks will be to make their socials more appealing and popular to parents. While the main goal could be to get more parents on their socials, they could have secondary goals like - getting more prospective new students, targeting international students etc. In this article we are going to look at social media ideas and strategies that will increase the school's following and engagement.
Before you start posting on their social media, do make sure to first design the content schedule - i.e. which platforms should you focus on? Facebook and Facebook groups should be your primary target as they have a lot of mum and parenting groups, which could be interested in your content. TikTok is newer and is where many young parents and kids are at. Youtube could be another channel to reach parents. You also need to decide how often should you post to their social media. If you are just starting out we recommend posting every single day - and at least twice a day on all of their pages - as if you do this, you will have a lot of data to quickly understand what works best, and what to avoid.
Once you have decided the frequency and social media platforms to be present on - you can start working on your content strategy. We researched Facebook and TikTok to see what kind of content has the most engagement from schools, and from this research - below are a few of the top ideas that are guaranteed to get you more engagement and followers for school.
Social media post ideas for schools:
Most of the ideas we saw revolved around parents. This is because parents use social media to keep up with events and happenings at the schools. As a parent, they'll follow the schools social media as long as the information is accurate - because for many parent's its their main way of finding out whats going on and things they need to know about.
It's important to highlight that you have to be careful about featuring children in the school's social media. Make sure that the parents have signed releases. Not every parent would want to see their child's photos online. So, if you are sharing photos of kids, avoid sharing full names, and make sure your school has a media form for sharing photos. Do get signed releases from every parent of a kid who might appear since they are minors. Also, make sure that you have someone in the school admin - who can supply you with all the relevant information which you need for their social media.
Let's gets started. Below are the top social media ideas for schools that we noticed got the most engagement online:
- Share content related to what a day in the classroom really looks like. This works because parents want to see how their kids are doing. Also, if someone is considering your school, these kind of posts and videos gives a lot of information to parents - which can help them decide if the school is a good choice for their children.
- Share content related to what kids are learning at your school and how.
- Share content about events and school culture but with photos to make it more engaging.
- Can you get teachers to share videos that will showcase learning?
- Can you get students to product content? If the school can encourage students to have a Social Media committee or club, and then give them the responsibility to produce content - it will show a different view of school life and atmosphere compared to what a social media manager creates.
- You can encourage students to share their activities, artwork, science projects etc. This is a also a great way to get parents involved - as when parents see kids on their school pages, they automatically want to share it.
- Can you highlight one different student every week - and talk about the students story - what they are studying, what they like, what they are excited about. You could get the "Social Media club" at school to email you a "day in the life" (of a music class, art class) for a student.
- Can you get the school's alumni to get involved? Maybe alumni can comment about their favourite memories, or give more insight into their careers and how to get to what they are doing.
- Every school has a morning announcements - can these be shared online on socials?
- If you have interesting events - maybe a special lecture, or a really big sports game, or the end of the year commencement, graduation ceremony - can these be streamed to the schools social media accounts?
- Can you start a parenting group to share information/answer questions publicly on social media?
- Can you start a weekly "Get to know the teacher" Q&A. Parents want to know the people who are caring and spending time with their children everyday.
- Can you start a weekly "Topics with students" Q&A. Each week you can ask the students in the school certain questions related to current and topical themes. The answers are always super interesting - and sharing something like this on video does get a lot of engagement from parents and teachers.
Summary: To summarise, the schools social media should be fun and interesting. It should be a combination of user(students)-generated-content, and content around teachers and parents. You should share classroom activities, highlight field trips, teachers, art projects from the kids for holidays.
There are more articles in our social media idea series:
