Top Strategy to Enhance your Language School’s Presence on Social Media
Top Strategy to Enhance your Language School’s Presence on Social Media
Gina Rodriguez One of the biggest language school marketing challenges is to ensure an effective social media presence that helps them be discoverable, reach new potential students, build trust in their language services and achieve their overall marketing goals.
The Importance of a Well-Planned Social Media Strategy
To have an effective social media presence, (i.e. that helps you attract students and take them from your socials into the classroom) you need a well-planned social media strategy . One of the key aspects of a successful social media strategy is having a continuous flow of engaging visual content that showcases the school’s unique offers and unique qualities. In other words, you need visual content that help sell your courses more easily!
About me: Hi, I’m Gina Rodriguez. I’m a qualified Digital Marketing Specialist and I work as a Social Media Strategist & Consultant for the language education sector . I have 25+ years experience in the English Language Teaching (ELT) industry and have covered various roles from EFL teacher, teacher trainer to Sales & Marketing Consultant in educational publishing.
How I help language schools: I help language schools and independent language professionals build an engaging social media presence through training, consultancy and tailored social media strategies.
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The Challenge of Creating Compelling Visual Content
Having enough compelling visual content is exactly where the biggest challenge lies for the marketing person or team in language schools.
Overcoming Budget and Schedule Constraints
Either because of a tight schedule or tight budget, language schools tend to have a small selection of visual assets available for social media posts. As a result, a language school’s social media feed may have too many photos of one service and none of other.
Balancing Content Types
For example, in the context of a language school working with international students it may happen that there are plenty of photos and videos of day trips and no visual content of the school, the staff or host families.
These are key pieces of content particularly for overseas parents considering to enrol their kids who are looking for extra behind the scenes information to trust that the school is a good option for them to invest. So in absence of content that responds to that need there’s a missed opportunity for the language academy.
For an enhanced social media presence that truly represents you and supports you with your marketing and sales you need to have a variety of authentic visual content types in the various positions the social network offers.
Whereas stock photos could do on a website (although this is not advisable), when it comes to social media marketing using only stock photos is totally counterproductive and it also goes against the nature of social media: authenticity!
How to post more and better content on social media
So what to do to ensure a constant flow of fresh and compelling visual content? Elementary Mr Watson… get your teachers and school staff on-board! Engage your language school staff in generating visual content for language school marketing.
Schools that find themselves in this situation could easily reverse it by applying a simple strategy: Engaging school staff in content creation, especially teachers. And no, don’t say it’s impossible until you try it.
Teachers, Admin staff and school monitors are with your students all the time and they are very often the only witnesses of the magic that happens at your school. So why not engage them in the process of content creation? It’ll be like cloning your marketing person and this will lead to increasing the volume of content to promote your language academy.
Teachers and Staff Involvement in Gathering Visual Content for Language School Marketing
Teachers and staff can have different levels of involvement in gathering visual content based on their motivation, skills, and personality.
I have identified three roles that can be assigned according to their level of commitment.
Let me share them with you:
Content Creator: This role is for the teacher, school monitor, or any staff member who takes responsibility for capturing school photos and videos of outstanding moments.
The Storyteller/PR: The person in this role steps in front of the camera to directly share stories, offer tips, make announcements, or celebrate achievements.
Facilitator: This staff member supports the visual content gathering process by liaising with the in-house marketing team. They identify moments worth capturing and inform the go-to social media person, ensuring these moments are documented.
Challenges to engage staff in gathering content and how to overcome them
There will be some challenges to overcome to be able to implement this strategy. You may find that content isn’t sent on time, that staff is put off by privacy issues or they may simply be so focused on their daily tasks that they forget to snap those vital scenes for the marketing of your language academy. Fair enough!
This is why I suggest running an orientation to start with, to cover all the necessary areas to ensure the project doesn’t get stuck with these issues.
Ideally the orientation will be hands-on and you can share checklists and important information such as “How to use students’ photos safely on social media” or share content from the school’s phone to the Drive.
Another super practical resource to share is my “21 Social Media Video Ideas” ebook.
The e-book will give you:
21 prompts that will inspire you to record videos that are unique to your school! ( No more stock videos!).
A checklist to plan step-by-step your first social-media-friendly video.
To support you beyond ideas, I have included guidelines to prepare quickly for the shoot with essential equipment.
Guidelines for posting and repurposing social media videos
Stop stressing out about visibility and get more relevant videos done in less time! Reach and engage with more potential students on social media.
Also, it’s vital to establish a way to support staff and be available for questions and doubts. This may be organizing a WhatsApp group for example.
Let me share with you easy steps to help you implement this strategy to gather more and better visual content for social media.
Steps to engage language school staff in gathering visual content
- Invite to Contribute
- Orientation/Training
- Continuous Support & Encouragement
- Regular Feedback
- Recognition
1. Invite to contribute: It’s important to give teachers and staff an overview of how social media can impact on enrolments. Also, illustrate what that impact means for the school and for them. This will help them understand why there’s a need to get them involved in ensuring a consistent flow of fresh visual content without cloning the marketing officer.
2. Orientation: Hold an orientation session with the members of staff willing to contribute to: 1. Brief them what type of content you need. 2. Clarify any tech issues 3. Agree on how many videos and photos they are expected to gather. 4. Decide to whom they should send the content to.
3. Support & Encouragement: This is a vital part for the success of the strategy and it’s an ongoing process. I’m referring not only to technical support, but also praise and encouragement for every contribution, big or small.
4 Regular Feedback: Make sure the teachers and other members of staff involved in gathering content for social media receive feedback regularly. This can be about how the assets are being used, comments and the impact on your social media insights.
5. Recognition: According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the need of being appreciated is essential for fulfilling the esteem needs of individuals. By rewarding the teacher, you are addressing her need for esteem. Esteem needs in Maslow’s hierarchy include both internal and external factors. Internal esteem factors are self-respect, autonomy, and achievement. On the other hand, external esteem factors are recognition, status, and appreciation from others. For this reason, rewarding teachers and staff is so important. It acknowledges their contribution and efforts, enhancing their sense of accomplishment and recognition within the language school team.
Language school Marketing made easier
If you are responsible for social media marketing, you likely oversee other aspects of language school marketing as well. This often requires stretching yourself thin or even wishing for a clone! Since cloning humans isn’t possible (yet!), adopting this simple yet effective content-gathering strategy will certainly make a difference
You will be surprised to see how much more content you will receive! Also, you won’t believe how many “golden moments” that used to go unseen will be revealed.
Don’t keep all the greatness that happens in the classroom and inside the school secret, share your story!
This is the exact strategy I use with clients (though it’s never that linear!) and I’m happy to chat if you need support to implement it in your language school. Check my contact details below!
Get in touch with Gina Rodriguez by email hello@grschoolmarketing or book a discovery call with her.