Four Photo Strategies to Tell Your School’s Story

A picture is worth a thousand words, a few likes on Facebook and the engagement of your fans online.

I love pictures. I have a box of pictures on my top shelf stored away in a box. These pictures tell the story of my life—from the time that I was a baby, through high school and college graduation, to marriage and kids. 

Every picture has a story to tell.

Take a look at the photo of my family. What story is told through this picture? We love our family. We love baseball. We enjoy being together. We do fun things together. This is a picture of our family on my son’s 12th birthday on opening day this year. The Rays beat the Yankees in the bottom of the 9th inning (can you tell that we are Ray’s fans?). This is a great story that we will remember forever.

Your school’s marketing strategy should focus on telling stories through photos on Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, other social media channels and on your website.

The following are four strategies for how you can tell your story and market your private school through photos:

Photo of the Day

In a recent review of about 400 school websites, I discovered some schools use a concept of “photo of the day” to tell a story at their school. The following are some examples of how schools used this strategy:

Brookwood School’s BPod Page — Brookwood has a page called, “BPod,” where they showcase a photo of the day and provide a caption to tell the photo’s story.

Northfield Mount Hermon and Milton Academy — Both of these schools post photos of the day on the home page of their website.

Facebook Updates

Dave Kerpen, author of Likeable Social Media, suggests that photos are one of the top five strategies you should use for posting on Facebook. Your posts should always contain a photo and a brief one or two sentence description to tell the story of the picture. In fact, if you don’t use a photo and only post text, your post is not likely to be read. Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal School in Memphis, one of my current clients, does a great job of telling stories through photos. You can check out their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/gslschool.

Blog Photos

A blog is a great tool to use to tell stories of your school. In every blog post, you should also include a photo to tell the story in a visually compelling way. You could even focus your blog on sharing a photo of the day and telling the story behind the photo. Noble and Greenough School shares a photo of the day in a blog. This is a great way to tell the story of your school through pictures.

Photo Tour

While you may not have the expertise or budget to produce a virtual tour of your school, you could easily create a photo tour and post it on your website. Check out the Chapin School photo tour on their website.

Taking and sharing photos has never been easier.  You can use your iPhone or digital camera to quickly capture images on campus. Then, you can easily upload them to Dropbox for online access. From there, you are just a few clicks away from adding them to your social media channels and website to tell the story of your school.

After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

How are you using photos to tell the story of your school?

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