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Recently, on Instagram, one of the accounts I follow was asking to have others share their “teaching” accounts so that they could build a network of fellow teachers who are using social media for education. It was a great idea and I jumped on board as a way of connecting. As I was clicking through the accounts, I noticed that none of these accounts were utilizing the power of social media to increase enrollment! What?!? You’re already doing the work, you might as well get the best return on time investment as possible.
If you are wanting to use social media for education effectively, you need to make sure your account is public (and preferably a business account), consistent, and has a variety of content geared toward future students in addition to current students.
In this episode, Khristen discusses:
- Benefits of a Public Business/Creator Account
- Staying Consistent
- Featuring a Variety of Content
Benefits of a Public Business/Creator Account
Regardless of whether or not you are using your account to increase enrollment, it needs to be public! As the social media account manager, I love it when other accounts tag me. It allows me to re-share the wonderful things they are doing in their classrooms. If your account is private, your content cannot be reshared!
If your account is private, I want you to ask yourself why that is the case. Most schools and districts are at an opt-out for social media and photos. In my experience, parents who wish their students to not be included let the school and all the teachers know.
If you are still worried about featuring students’ faces for privacy reasons, you can be creative. One example is to take a photo while students are working from the profile or over-the-shoulder. I’ve also seen photos where students are holding up a recently completed project. The focus is then on the project and not the students. This allowed for their heads and legs to be cropped out without feeling awkward.
Now that we’ve discussed being public, there are also benefits to having a Business or a Creator account. The biggest benefit is that you can view the “insights.” This allows you to see how your followers are interacting with your posts. You can then plan more of those in the future.
Staying Consistent with Your Social Media
Another mistake I noticed with these accounts was that while they posted their handle they hadn’t posted for several months. These users are merely consumers, not creators and that doesn’t make me personally want to follow them. Social media is meant to be “social” and therefore, the conversation goes both ways.
If you want students/parents and future students/parents to follow you, you need to be posting consistently and giving them content they can rely on. This also helps with the algorithm because not everything you post will get seen by all your followers. In order to increase the likelihood of people seeing your posts, you need to have consistent content that drives engagement.
You don’t need to go crazy with posting, but posting once a day during the school-week is enough to get you seen in feeds. If you are a business or creator account, you can also check out to see when the best times to post would be for your followers and use a scheduler to post during those times.
Featuring a Variety of Content
While you might follow an account that just posts CTE facts, would you engage with that account? I know that I would probably like an occasional post, but probably not comment, and because my engagement would be down, the platform would stop showing posts from that account. Look at your feed from the perspective of a future student or parent. Would they find what you are posting interesting?
In Episode 15: Are You Tired of Not Knowing What To Post On Social Media? I talked about using content categories in order to know what to be posting. Using these categories makes it easier to not only know what to post but to mix it up so that you are not just posting one type of content. Make sure that your categories aren’t just geared toward your current students. What will your future students as well as your past students still find engaging?
Once again, if you have a business or creator account, you can look at the analytics and see which categories are doing better than others and try to include more of that when you post in the future. This is also a great way of testing out a variety of photos to see how people react.
Here’s your challenge, take a good look at the account that you are wanting to use to increase enrollment. Make some changes so that you can maximize your time and energy.
If you need to get a kickstart on your planning and posting, get these 5 FREE customizable templates that you can start using today!
