Whether you’re a headmaster, a school secretary or a teacher, running social media accounts for your school or college can be hard work.
You’ll naturally want to promote your establishment in the best possible light, encourage discussions with parents and share important news and information, but you also have to think about safeguarding children and ensuring that the content you share is safe, appropriate and relevant to your audience.
If you’re struggling to manage your social media channels, then fear not: below, we’ve put together some social media post ideas for schools and colleges to give you a helping hand and send you on your way to creating engaging content that leaves parents and governors happy and students up to date.
Reminders for students
Perhaps one of the most useful ways to utilise social media for a college or school is to post regular reminders and updates.
It may be that you want to countdown the weeks until exam season, remind parents of the upcoming half term, or even give students a reminder that their homework is due on Monday morning.
Depending on the size of your establishment, you may decide to set up separate Twitter and Facebook accounts for different departments, like maths, English and science, but managing multiple accounts can be hard work, so we recommend that you stick to a single account, to begin with, to maximise your audience and potential reach.
Some important dates in the school calendar that you should prepare posts for include:
- Half Term reminders
- Summer Holiday and Christmas Holiday reminders
- Countdown to GCSE or A-Level exams
- A reminder of GCSE and A-Level results days
- Parent’s Evening reminders
- Professional Development Day reminders
- Interesting TV shows (i.e. cookery class may ask students to watch Bake Off)
- Back to School tips (what to bring with you, etc)
- Field Trips and School Trips
- Charity Events and Fundraising Days
- School Plays and Extracurricular Classes
- School Uniform Days
This school posts about their half-term dates to remind students and parents.
Enrolment information
If you’re looking to encourage more students to sign up to your college, then you should start by targeting school leavers during the summer months.
You may want to push out some adverts on Facebook, where you ask 16-year-olds what they’re planning to do once September comes.
You can stress the benefits of your college, whether that’s because you offer free bus passes or you have an onsite cafeteria and use targeted advertising to avoid enrollment at rival colleges.
For parents, you can offer some useful tips and tricks on how to help your child pick the right college, and remind them of deadlines and dates to apply.
The more active you are on social media, the easier it’ll be for parents and students to get in touch and enrol with you, so it makes sense to schedule content throughout the day and at peak times, like evenings and weekends.
A college reminding school leavers that it’s not too late to enrol.
Images and videos from events
The chances are that you host a lot of events and opening evenings at your school or college, so find someone to tweet along and create your own hashtag, too.
Sharing images of students and staff having a good time not only puts the school in a positive light, but it encourages other people to get involved and attend future events.
And, when you incorporate a hashtag and ask people to use it when tweeting along, you can create a ‘viral event’ and trend in your local area.
If you want to hand over some of the responsibility of tweeting along during events, then you could ask your students to do it for you.
Get them to sign in to your school accounts on their smartphones, and they can practice photography, live blogging and journalism in one go.
It’s great fun, and it helps them to develop new skills – and takes away the pressure from you!
Live tweeting during school events is good fun and increases engagements.
Revision tips and advice
Encourage your students to follow you on social media – or ask them to create second social media accounts just for school purposes – and you’ll be able to drip feed useful information and revision tips to them as they scroll through their news feeds.
Rather than sitting down in front of your computer every evening, you can use social media tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, and schedule content for weeks in advance.
A post or two every day about science or history won’t take too long, and your students will take it in as they read through your content. Add some custom graphics, GIFs or images to your posts, and you’ll be on to a winner.
One teacher has put together some great revision tips for her students.
Can we help?
If you’re struggling to take control of your social media accounts, or you need help growing your audience so that more local students and parents are accessing your content, then you’ve come to the right place.
At 99social, we offer affordable social media management for educational establishments from as little as £99 per month, so get in touch today to find out more.