Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your School
A lot of schools are trying to be on all social media platforms, following trends and pouring all their time and money into activities that don't bring financial outcomes. But the main job of your social media is to bring you money - coming from new or returning students.
In this article, we will show you how not to fall into the trap of being everywhere, all the time. We will help you to analyze your data and to find the most optimal social platforms for your school.
Shortcuts:
Why You Need to Know Your Audience and Goals for Your Business
How to Get Useful Insights by Conducting an Analysis on Social Media Platforms for Your Own Business
How to Analyze your Data for Optimizing Your Social Media Content
Conclusion: Incorporating Data into Your Marketing Plan Can Make all the Difference
The Different Types of Social Media Platforms
Social media allow people to connect with others and share content in a way that suits their needs. During the past few years, many social media platforms have evolved and each of them offers different features. There are many types of social media, but among the most used ones are social networking sites and the media sharing network.
The first group are the ones that allow people to meet, reconnect or keep in touch with other people. The most popular examples are Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace (and country-specific variations). In the second group, there are the platforms that are used to find and share photographs, videos, and specific information (knowledge).
Now you might think: wait a minute! Don’t all platforms allow you to share pictures, videos, and knowledge? Technically – they do. But the main difference is that in the second group sharing media is the basic role of the platform, while the connection and “meaningful interaction” is being pushed to the side burner.
Instagram and YouTube are the most famous social sharing platforms, but there are others such as TikTok and the slowly forgotten by most Snapchat.
Despite those groups, there are still the microblogging services, such as Twitter and Tumblr; the content curation networks, like Pinterest and Flipboard; and even discussion forums and the customer review networks (like Quora and Trustpilot).
With so many social media options, you might feel a bit overwhelmed. But the point is: you are not an influencer! You need a marketing strategy for language schools, which involves being active only on the platforms where your clients (or future clients) are.
Why Do You Need to Know Your Audience and Goals for Your Business
Doing your homework before investing your time and/or money in social media is the key to success. You need to know the market, your audience, and the goals of your company in order to succeed.
Considering that each of the social media platforms listed above have their own set of features and functions to provide users with, and that it is up to the user to decide which platform they want to use and for what, you must find out where your potential students are and what they’re doing there, in order to have a fighting chance in the see of online content and advertising.
With that, the goals for your school (most probably) are: generating conversations, building partnerships, and bringing in new students.
Spend some time getting to know your students, to which different platforms do they go with what type of needs or questions, and find that sweet spot where their needs meet your goals. Et voilà: you know which platforms to focus on!
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How to Get Useful Insights by Conducting an Analysis on Social Media Platforms for Your Own Business
Analyzing social media platforms gives you a chance to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, understand your students better, and get to know more about their needs and wants.
Social media platforms provide data that can become invaluable insights for your business. You can conduct an in-depth analysis on these platforms at any time by yourself or with a help of professional marketers (we’re for grabs in case you need our help 😉)
It helps you analyze what people want from you, how they feel about your company, what do they dislike the most, what should you improve upon, and, in the specific topic of this article, to get to know which is the right social media platform for your school.
How to Analyze your Data for Optimizing Your Social Media Content
First of all, you have to collect your data. For that, you can begin by asking your current students two questions:
which social media are they using right now and for what purposes?
and how did they use your social platform in the past?
Example: Ask your students whether they found your school through social media (if yes - which one?) or did they found you elsewhere (Google, Trustpilot) and used your social media only to find out more about your school. If that is the case, where did they find you? Or did your school come as a recommendation from their expat friends?
Those three scenarios (finding you through social media, other online sources, or through friends) will require three different social media strategies from you.
Usually, your potential students search in Google for a “[Language] School/ Courses in [name of the city]” and then they go to your social profiles to check what you are all about. Based on the impression that you give on your platforms they make their decision about committing to you, which relates to whether they like or not what you posted there. *
*Unless they’re bargain-shopping. In that case, the only way to win their hearts is to be the cheapest option possible 🤷♀️
After talking to your current students (be it face to face or via surveys), it is time to see what your website is telling you! Check the statistics and see where your traffic is coming from. From which social platforms is it coming? Is it coming from Facebook or from LinkedIn? From Instagram or from YouTube?
In most cases, for language schools, the traffic is coming mainly from Facebook and YouTube. That happens because Facebook is where the expats are hanging out to interact with other expats in the groups and events. And YouTube is the search engine a lot of expats use to learn a language at home, and it happens to be a part of the Google family (it is connected to your google ads! 🤯). So if you’ll target your ads wisely – you can harness the power of YouTube without producing any lengthy videos by yourself! 😉
Instagram and LinkedIn, on the other hand, for most of the schools are not the most common sources of traffic (but that also depends strongly on the type of your target audience!).
To analyze your data, follow the information provided both by your students and by your website. Those sources give you the most valuable information, follow them! If they say that Facebook is the most important social media for your school, then invest there and don’t waste energy on Instagram, and so on.
According to our website analytics when it comes to social media most of our traffic comes from our Instagram profile (27 visits), followed by Facebook (4) and LinkedIn (4). We optimize all of our graphics for Instagram.
Finally, when you will find out your most important source of leads (students), you can optimize your posts to the domain that will be your main social media platform.
You can use the same material on different social media, but when you will be creating it, you should have in mind the particularities of your main chosen platform. Those are the format, size, and quality of the posts, as well as their duration and how they will be stored and organized there.
Furthermore, don’t forget to pay attention to how the expats interact with your profile – if it is for researching your school for the first time or to getting convinced that you are a good choice – because that will also make a difference to the content that you are producing.
Conclusion: Incorporating Data into Your Marketing Plan Can Make all the Difference
To sum up what was discussed in this article - it is safe to say that by incorporating data into your marketing plan, you can find out more about how your students interact with social channels and approach the future ones with a better understanding of “what makes them tick”.
For that you don’t need to post daily on all the social media platforms, nor have an account on all of them.
Let us repeat: you are not an influencer and your goal is not to go viral.
What you need is to be active on the platforms where your potential clients are and understand the goals for your content in order to make more sales, find new students and keep the ones you already have coming back.
We are keeping our fingers crossed and please feel free to reach out in case you have any additional questions! 🤞
Save up to 4 hours a week on content creation and increase student enrollments!
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facing creative blocks
feeling the need to copy their competitors
So if you want a crystal clear and predictable roadmap to help you get more students, look no further!
