Social media calendar for your school: Follow these tips

Building a social media strategy can be time-consuming and tricky to master without an organized outline. For many schools, not having a calendar that plans content weekly, monthly or even each semester can lead to poor strategy and miscommunication.

That is why it’s important to implement a social media calendar that will help you stay on task and manage multiple platforms. This can benefit your school in ways like increasing engagement, boosting enrollment, and reaching potential new audiences.

Follow these tips to improve your social performance.

1) Choosing the right channel

To start, it’s important to understand that when it comes to the channel, it’s better to have a consistent presence on one or two than a haphazard presence on multiple ones.

For schools, it is better, to begin with, Instagram and Facebook, as these platforms offer the most reach and diverse content options. You can then expand your presence on LinkedIn and maybe even TikTok for further engagement with parents and students.

2) Deciding what to include

To know what type of content to include or create on your social media profiles, the first and most important question you need to answer is, what you’re using/needing your social platforms for. Are you using them to promote your school, engage with parents about school life, or mostly inform them about events and activities?

These questions will help define your social media strategy as they will give you a clearer idea of what kind of posts to include.

3) How often should you post

It is recommended to follow these posts’ allotment. For Facebook, start with 1-2 posts daily. For Instagram you can play with posts and stories, therefore 1 post per day and 3-5 stories will do. In addition to that, reels are a new trend, and one daily is good enough to create engagement. For LinkedIn, you can create 3-4 posts weekly and Twitter works well if you tweet 3 or more times per day.

A good idea is to post per departmental request. For example, if you are planning 5 posts per week, make sure to give each department a space. You can post 2 for athletics, 2 for extra-curricular, and 1 for admissions. If there is an event and you already have your daily allotment, use the Stories feature to post additional content. Keep in mind that posting more than the recommended amount will not make the algorithms work in your favor as social media content allowances can be strict.

4) Be aware of the text

Text in social posts is crucial! Once you have sorted out dates and content, you can work on what text or media will go in the post. Make sure to keep the text or caption interesting, brief, and accurate as people are less likely to read a long paragraph.

A good tip is to have your posts and captions ready ahead of time, this will help you stay organized and not come up with last-minute posts. Make sure to include some calls to action from time to time and to use relevant and local hashtags we sell.

5) Who will be in charge of the calendar?

Last but not least, it’s important to have someone or a team of people dedicated to managing social media and scheduling posts. Whether it’s the same person or 2 different people, having someone dedicated to this activity will bring consistency to the schedule and overall calendar.

You can also opt to work with a Digital Marketing agency like Ibis Studio to help you schedule, manage, and create a social media calendar with designs, captions, and everything in between.

Creating a planned social media calendar will help your school increase its engagement, keep the community in the loop, and work with the algorithms that impact your organic reach.

Keep in mind that if you want to optimize your organic reach, following these tips will help you along the way. It is always advised to work with a professional that knows all the tricks of social media algorithms for accurate and better results. Contact us today to learn more!