How to give a facelift to a boring school Facebook page
How to give a facelift to a boring school Facebook page
Gina Rodriguez Struggling to find ideas to post on your school’s Facebook page? Tired of having always the same type of posts on your school Facebook page? Thinking of giving your school’s Facebook page a facelift?
Then you are in the right place!
First of all, congrats on taking action to improve your school Facebook page. Facebook pages with only offers, discounts and “Happy XX day” posts have zero engagement, poor organic visibility and don’t impress visitors. So you are right to look into giving a facelift to your school Facebook page! It will lead to a wider awareness of your school in the market and increase engagement on the page.
In this article, I will share easy-to-apply ideas based on content marketing principles. Once you use these ideas you will feel more confident about what to post and less stressed out by the constant pressure of not knowing what to post on your school Facebook page. Ready?
Foundations for a good facelift for your school Facebook page
1. Focus on students.
Find out ( but I’m sure you already know) what your students’ needs (not only linguistic needs), interests and pain points are. This will guide you in choosing the appropriate content to share and post on your school’s Facebook page.
2. Mind these “E”s
Bear in mind that the posts on your school Facebook page should aim at these “E”s:
*Engage *Entertain *Educate *Encourage action
3. Apply the 50:30:20 rule
Stick to the 50:30:20 rule! Normally I see on language schools’ Facebook pages posts that are aimed at selling. However, people aren’t on social media to buy. Ideally what you want is to have 50% of posts that engage, 30% of posts that educate and ONLY 20% of posts that are explicitly selling.
4. Mix post types
Add variety to your posts types. Use a mix of photos, videos, carousels, graphics, and links. Have a look at your school Facebook page to check which type(s) you are missing and start using them.
5. Content curation
Start sharing carefully selected content from blogs and other pages on your school’s Facebook page. It has to be relevant to your students and parents and ideally, you want to make a comment on it as well as invite people to share their views and feelings.
When you carefully select content to share with your followers, you provide them with additional value by giving them access to multiple perspectives.
Christina Newberry, Hootsuite.com
Now that we have set up the foundations let’s look at posts that will transform your school Facebook page:
a. Posts that make students and parents’ everyday lives easier
Dates: go through the calendar and remind your students of coming public national and local holidays, enrolment deadlines, exam dates. Do this with a nice-looking post that you can easily create on Canva like this one:
A post like this one gets easily noticed on your school’s Facebook page. Add a hashtag e.g #datesforyourdiary to help users track posts on your page.
Practical information: the intention here is to “educate” your students about the services you use and at the same time give them a good user experience with your school.
You will want to share things from public transport info (bus stops, free parking slots), shops in the area (great for working mums), to how to redeem codes for the ebooks or access your platform.
Reminders: why not share links to online pages that were used in class so that they simply click and access them. It could be the link to an article, a song or a video shown in class. Get teachers into the habit of passing them on to you after the lesson.
FAQs: you probably have a list of those about admin or language. Answering FAQs through different post formats is a winning strategy because it is content that is truly relevant for your students and parents and also for any prospect.
b. Posts that make everyone laugh and come back to your page for more endorphins!
If we talk about humour then you know that you should be sharing posts with jokes, cartoons, puns, memes on your school Facebook page. However, the choice shouldn’t be random but carefully chosen in a way that the content is relatable to your students or connected to a trending topic or holiday (e.g Valentine’s Day, Christmas etc.).
Where to get them? Have a look at the websites in the “Useful websites and pages for your school Facebook page” that I put together for you (Download it here below) Also, edutainment posts fall into this category. Here’s a great example of edutainment (education + entertainment). It’s a video that teaches vocab in a nice entertaining way and has a fun moment at the end. I think it illustrates clearly the type of posts that you should aim for. Watch it and be inspired!
Short of ideas of what to post on your socials? Let me tell you that random ideas won’t get you far. What you need is a bank of ideas that are relevant to your language school and that help you:
Be consistent on social media
Support your overall marketing strategies
Bring students closer to you
I understand that creating a post like this for your school Facebook page might seem a little bit time-consuming. TIP: If you have teenage classes you could ask them to come up with something funny and share their work. They will be delighted and you will have some amazing content created by your students to share and impress parents.
c. Posts that support students’ in life
University students will love seeing posts on your school Facebook page that share countries to visit, checklists for Erasmus, University rankings and so on. In other words, they will enjoy having posts that add value to their lives.
For the digital generation, posts about digital well-being or digital footprint could be not only really interesting but also educative (for everyone!). Students use devices and are highly connected but that doesn’t mean that they are digitally literate. Check this one here:
In practice, this type of post will be about bringing to the students topics that will help them in their lives. In a way, you kind of do this already in class 😉
If you have adult courses with parents they will certainly find posts like this one helpful and relatable to them:
University students will love seeing posts about countries to visit, checklists for Erasmus, University rankings.
d. Posts that inspire and make feel good
This type of post is highly engaging and people tend to share. I would recommend sharing these:
*Quotes *TedTalks *Good News
If you feel like going the extra mile, then take a moment to jot down what advice or information would be valuable to them. Consider, generally speaking, what they do, their lifestyle and interests. This will guide you in your search and once you find good content you can create posts with Canva or simply share on your Facebook page (and ALWAYS credit the source).
And now what?
If it feels like a lot of work on top of what you already have then you could ask for help from your teachers. A thirty-minute meeting to brainstorm ideas, gather resources, and plan the posting routine and post types will definitely help you.
Also, ask your staff to share the posts and invite students in the class to visit the page and tell you what they liked or found useful. When posting, always include a comment or question that will encourage a reply or encourage an action like visiting your website, sharing the post, booking a demo lesson and so on.
Next steps
I have covered some ideas to get you started with the facelift of your school’s Facebook page. There are endless possibilities to generate post ideas for your Facebook page. Here you can find out how to generate post ideas for your school Facebook page that are unique to you!.
Remember: the most important point is to remain relevant and relatable to your students while in line with English language teaching.
I have also put together a list of useful websites and pages for your content curation that you can download here below. There you will find content to share on your Facebook page to make it more engaging and fun. You may want to ask students or teachers for websites they like and go to for inspiration, fun and info and add them to the list.
Useful websites and pages for your school Facebook pageReady to give a facelift to your school’s Facebook page?
I do hope you feel like you are ready to give a facelift to your Facebook page. I’m sure that if you put these ideas into practice your school Facebook page will never look boring again! What’s more, you will start having more engagement and organic visibility!
Last but not least, take a look at your Facebook page info section and make it more effective with the guidelines I shared in this article.
If you want to customize your Facebook page even more, then feel free to drop me a line through the contact form or email me at hello@grschoolmarketing.com and I will be delighted to help you.
