Social media best practices for schools are a dime a dozen. From building audience personas to sharing student testimonials and experimenting with posting times, you probably have a few up your sleeve.

Most of the tips, however, are merely tactics: A set of steps to achieve a specific outcome, say, increasing followers or coming up with post ideas.

But what about the challenges of campus unrest, exclusivity, inaccessibility, or responding to negative comments?They are as important as a posting schedule, and yet, not discussed enough.

Let’s change that. A structured school's social media plan can help address these challenges and achieve your goals effectively.

Keep reading to learn the dos and don’ts of social media marketing for schools.

Creating a School’s Social Media Plan

Creating a school’s social media plan is a crucial step in establishing a strong online presence. A well-crafted plan helps schools achieve their marketing, admission, and advancement efforts. To start, set measurable goals such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving website traffic. Identifying your target audience is equally important—think about current students, parents, and prospective students. Once you know who you’re talking to, select the most effective social media platforms for your goals and audience. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are popular choices, but the key is to choose those that align with your objectives and where your audience is most active.

Selecting Social Media Platforms

Selecting the right social media platforms is essential for schools to effectively reach their target audience. While Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are popular, other platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok may also be suitable depending on your school’s goals and audience. Consider the age and demographics of your target audience and the type of content you want to share. For instance, Instagram is ideal for sharing visual content, while Twitter is better suited for short updates and news. By choosing the right platforms, you can ensure your social media efforts are both effective and engaging.

Prepare social media community guidelines

This will be the single most important document for your social media team. But what even are social media community guidelines?

A social media community guideline is like a handbook for your school’s social media managers. It mentions a set of rules, tactics, tools, and thought processes behind concerns like:

• How to engage with comments

• Preferred voice and style to use

• How to create and use visual content

• How to create a strategy

• Notes on information accuracy, accessibility, and laws

• How to handle a controversial topic on your page

• The many do's and don'ts of running social media accounts

Your community guideline can be a non-exhaustive one-pager like UC Santa Barbara’s. Or create more comprehensive guides covering different aspects of social media branding and marketing, such as the University of Michigan: From platform-specific best practices to tools and templates.

Make social media content accessible

If your student community comprises people from diverse backgrounds and disabilities, social media accessibility shouldn’t only be lip service.

It should be reflected in how you communicate and pass on information on your socials to truly offer a m and inclusive community experience.

Here are a few tips to make your social media content more accessible.

• Write social media posts using simple and plain language for quick comprehension.

• Limit the use of emojis. And if you have to use them, don’t use them as word replacements. For example, instead of saying “I ❤️ New York,” use “I love New York ❤️ ”

• Always use CamelCase for your hashtags and put them towards the end of the post, like #GoBlue instead of #goblue.

• Add closed captions or burn captions to videos if the platform doesn’t support captioning.

• Avoid using abbreviations. Or, if you must, make sure to spell it out

• Add alternative texts (alt texts) to images, GIFs, and graphics you publish on socials. If the option isn’t available, you can also describe the visual content in its caption.

• Avoid using GIFs to convey information as they don’t have easily accessible support.

• Provide high-definition images or those with high contrast.

Managing Social Media Presence

Managing a school’s social media presence requires ongoing effort and attention. Designate a social media point person to oversee your social media accounts and ensure consistency in posting and engagement. Establish a social media calendar to plan and schedule content in advance, ensuring your social media feed remains active and engaging. Monitoring your social media accounts for negative comments and responding promptly is crucial to maintaining a positive online presence. By staying proactive, you can address any concerns or issues that arise and keep your community engaged.

Plan for social media crisis communication

During times of unrest or unforeseen circumstances, social media can become a fast and efficient tool for crisis communication.

You can share information and update the community in real time while avoiding the spread of misinformation.

For example, when Stanford University’s campus faced a sudden power outage during exam season, they used X to share updates and keep the students and faculty in the loop.

But there’s a small challenge to effective social media crisis communication: Planning the right responses.

This takes time, so it’s best to prepare some guidelines for your team.

You should ideally focus on the following key areas:

• Assigning roles: In case of emergencies, who will be the spokesperson? Who will review and approve the social posts? Think of last-minute decisions you’ll have to take and assign responsibilities accordingly.

• Maintaining transparency: Convey information in a transparent and honest way without overwhelming the community.

• Disseminating information: Make sure the information is quickly and clearly conveyed to the people concerned. Always proofread and check the posts for factual accuracy.

• Engaging community: Call to the spirit of community by sharing messages of solidarity and showing empathy. Respond to concerning comments and give assurance whenever you can.

• Preparing guidelines: From tone of voice to channels for communication and how to form the messages, create communication guidelines to help your team respond responsibly.

You can also take cues from schools that are already a step ahead. For example, here’s a small excerpt from West Virginia University’s crisis communication guidelines.

It clearly states what to do and what not to do during alarming situations, which helps your team in a state of unrest.

Create and use unique hashtags

Cheers like Berkeley’s “Be Berkeley,” University of Michigan’s “Go Blue!” or Purdue University’s “Boiler Up!” have the power to unite and inspire. They can fill the students with a sense of community and pride, fostering meaningful connections.

So, why not turn the cheers into hashtags? Most schools, like the University of Michigan, already use cheers as hashtags to promote sporting events and categorize posts.

Having a unique hashtag to your university’s name also has multiple benefits.

• Boost awareness: Dedicated hashtags can become your brand’s unique identifiers, widening your reach and discoverability on social media feeds.

• Improve engagement: With increased exposure, you can bring in more likes, comments, shares, and followers to improve engagement.

• Collect user-generated content (UGC) from students: Having your own hashtags, much like a jersey, will encourage students and alumni to share their experiences, which you can collect for UGC marketing.

• Promote events with special hashtags: Create specific hashtags for school events like #HarvardGrad2024 to track and amplify related content.

Embrace social listening

Most social media platforms come with built-in analytics. So you can easily monitor how each and every post of yours is faring. But beyond monitoring likes, comments, and followers, there's something else you should be doing: social listening.

Social listening for schools and colleges is a way to gather honest feedback by scouring social media feeds for mentions and conversations connected with your institute.

For example, on X (formerly Twitter), Purdue University often responds to tweets mentioning or talking about their institute.

This is great because engagement is a two-way street; more responses mean more visibility.

If you’re up for the challenge, here are some ways to perform social listening:

• Monitor tags and mentions of your college’s name

• Track trending posts and topics among your target audience

• Follow hashtags related to your institute, events, programs or higher education in general

• You can also use social listening tools like Sprout Social, Mention, or Hootsuite to gain deeper insights

• Watch out for alumni posts and groups to engage in conversations

Staff Training and Support

Providing staff training and support is essential for ensuring your school’s social media presence is effective and consistent. Offer training on social media best practices, including how to create engaging content, use hashtags, and respond to comments and messages. Support staff members responsible for managing social media accounts by providing access to social media management tools and resources. This helps ensure that your team feels confident and equipped to manage your school’s social media presence effectively.

Don’t use ableist language

When we use ableist language (even unknowingly), we end up perpetuating ableism: Discrimination against people with disabilities, which can be visible and non-visible, through stereotyping or unconscious bias.

The word dumb, for example, was initially used to describe a person who did not speak. But over the years, the word has taken on negative implications:

The same goes for words and phrases like turn a blind eye, crazy, tone deaf, wheelchair-bound, simpleton or lame, which devalue and disrespect people with disabilities.

This is why it’s important to use disability-inclusive language.

Below is a page dedicated to guiding students on how to use inclusive language. But ironically, the title ‘Unhandicap Your Language’ does the opposite. This is how casually we can slip up.

The best way to talk about people with disability is to use people-first language—to focus on the ability instead of the disability. So:

• ‘Differently-abled’ becomes ‘person with disability’

• ‘Handicap parking’ becomes ‘accessible parking’

• ‘They suffer from’ becomes ‘They have’

Don't talk politics

Social media is the breeding ground for controversial topics. Posts are often blown out of proportion, snowballing into verbal spats and campus unrest. And sometimes, the heat reaches the campus as well.

When the comedy veteran Jerry Seinfeld was announced to give a speech at the Duke University commencement ceremony, dozens of students walked out to protest his support for Israel.

And there’s a lesson to be learned here: Most college-bound students are heavily influenced by a school’s official stance on political issues when deciding to enroll.

So, while avoiding fiercely conflicted topics and staying neutral is better, you shouldn’t shy away from demonstrating the social values you stand by. Like sustainability, diversity inclusion, or supporting the LGBTQ+ community.

For example, the University of Michigan creates a safe space for students to have open dialogues about crucial topics like Juneteenth and its significance.
 

Don’t ignore negative comments

On social media, as a public organization, you’re bound to get good and bad comments. What do you do? Many schools will respond to positive comments and ignore the negative ones.

Texas State University, for example, uses the framework below to determine whether to delete or respond to a comment.

Positive comments are easy to tackle. But in case of negative comments, asking the commentators to take the conversation over email is a good solution.

The University of Michigan also follows a similar engagement protocol. But instead of tackling the comment themselves, they take a screenshot and share it with the public affairs team.

But there’s also option C: If the comments are made from a throwaway account aiming to hurt your reputation or if they are using discriminatory or profane language, then you can also hide, block, and report the comment or user based on the situation.

Montclair State University, for example, uses a specific set of markers to identify comments to remove. This makes the process easier for the team.

You can always create your own process to tackle comments, both positive and negative. But keeping a watchful eye and monitoring comments is the key.

Don’t post on every social media platform

Your target audience isn’t on every social media platform. For example, students used YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok to view and engage with the college’s social media accounts.

While social media is a powerful tool for marketing, sticking to platforms aligned with your university’s goals is a more financially sound decision.

• You can target your audience where they actually hang out instead of shooting arrows in the dark

• Your team won’t have to worry about continually ideating and creating content

• Maintaining a consistent posting schedule can also stretch your resources thin

• Having a presence everywhere may lead to audience disengagement

By focusing on fewer, more relevant platforms, you can streamline your efforts and market better. You also save money and resources without compromising on the quality of content.

Create social media walls to boost engagement

In higher education marketing, nothing works better than appealing to emotions. This is where visual-driven storytelling comes into play.

You can create and embed social media walls on your website and college landing pages to offer social proof and boost engagement. For example, Ohio University’s Russ College of Engineering and Technology homepage gives a glimpse into campus life with a grid of social media feeds.

It also encourages the website visitor to engage and connect with the institute with appropriate CTAs, improving the dwell time (+ interactive content gets 52.6% higher engagement than static content).

Another example comes from Harvard. Alumni of the Harvard and Radcliffe College Class come together on campus every five years for reunions.

This thoughtfully curated carousel showcases people having a good time, which naturally encourages participation and strengthens alumni relations.

With Flockler, you can display unlimited social media feeds. Share campus life, student-generated content, and more within minutes. Sign up for a 14-day trial to get started.

Monitoring and Evaluation

Monitoring and evaluating your school’s social media presence is crucial to ensuring its effectiveness. Track social media metrics such as engagement rates, follower growth, and website traffic. Conduct regular social media audits to assess your social media presence and identify areas for improvement.

This helps refine your social media strategy and make data-driven decisions to optimize your online presence. By consistently monitoring and evaluating your efforts, you can ensure that your social media strategy aligns with your goals and positively impacts your community.

FAQs

1. What social media should schools use?

Schools should use Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), which are the most popular social media platforms among college and college-bound students.

2. How often should a university post on social media?

Aim to post three to five times a week. You can also do one post per day (if the quality is good, your audience will engage willingly) or one post once a week during semester breaks or exam weeks.

However, there is no set rule of thumb. It’s best to experiment and see what works for your institute.