Are You Making This Mistake on Your School’s Facebook Page?

Take a look back at your posts on your school’s Facebook page last month. In fact, go through your posts and summarize what you find.

What did you post?

How frequently did you post on your school’s Facebook page?

Did you share news, stories and blog posts?

How many of your posts were actual links back to your website?

It’s critical for you to think about your Facebook posting strategy.

One of the primary mistakes made on school Facebook pages is that the updates don’t share stories, news and blog posts from their website. Instead, their Facebook page looks like a scrapbook of pictures and captions from the week.

Your school’s Facebook strategy should be centered in your website.

Let me explain.

Your website should be the home and hub for your content, which should include your news, stories and blog articles. By adding content to your website every week, you should then share these posts on Facebook and other social media sites.

Typically, I will recommend to marketing and enrollment directors that they follow this strategy:

• News – Post 2-4 news articles on your website every week. These news articles should highlight “news” stories at your school. The news articles can be short—one to two paragraphs—and should include a photo. You have great things to share and you need to publish the “news” about your school.

• Stories – Stories can become a foundational section on your website to highlight your faculty, students, parents and alumni. By posting at least two stories of your people every week, you help to bring your school to life through people. Check out a recent blog post about Eastern Christian’s storytelling approach on their website.

• Blog – A blog can be used to effectively communicate helpful and practical content to your current and prospective parents, as well as anyone else. By posting a 300-600 word article once a week, you will have great content to share. The Sewickley Academy blog is a great example.

By writing and uploading these articles on your website every week, your website will become your content hub. With 5-7 new articles posted in your news, stories and blog, you will have dynamic content that you can push out to Facebook and your other social media sites. Then, you can add in additional posts that have more of the scrapbook feel (pictures and captions of school life).

This approach will result in a robust Facebook strategy that will include a significant number of posts that direct traffic back to your website.

Last year, one school that I was coaching implemented this strategy, and the result was a significant increase (1000%) in traffic from Facebook to their website.

In addition, you should consider boosting some of these posts. By paying for these posts to appear in your target audience’s news feed, you will provide more exposure for your school with the news, stories and blog posts housed on your website.

This is exactly what you want. Facebook, as well as other social media channels, should be utilized to drive traffic back to your school’s website through the news, stories and blog posts you share.

Are you making the mistake of not posting news, stories and blog articles from your website to Facebook?

How can you implement this strategy in your school’s marketing effort?