Harvard University is the ‘Mr. Beast’, the crème de la crème of social media for schools, with over 10 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and LinkedIn.

While we can argue the numbers are a reflection of the institute’s legacy (most likely), however, they’re also a reflection of its consistent marketing efforts on social media.

After all, social media is social proof for college-bound students. Like begets like. Follow begets follow.

Wondering how to achieve such a feat on socials? We’ve got you.

Here’s a marketing checklist to crack social media for schools. We provide a step-by-step guide—from conducting a social media audit to building a content calendar.

Your 7-step social media marketing checklist for schools

⌨️ Conduct a social media audit

🫂 Build target audience personas

🧑‍💻 Develop a social media strategy

📝 Create a social media content calendar

🤝 Double down on engagement tactics

📈 Select KPIs to track

📊 Analyze social media performance

1. Conduct a social media audit

There’s a reason(s) why your social media marketing plan is only getting B+ engagement. A social media audit is key to understanding why and how to surpass it.

To do so, open a good old spreadsheet or use any project management tool (Notion and ClickUp are good options) to document your social media audit.

• Start with each social media profile. Make sure they're optimized and updated.

• Check how each platform is performing (native platform analytics will do the job), and see if it's worth continuing the efforts.

• Notice audience interactions and reactions to specific types of topics or content formats that get higher engagement.

• Contextualize growth numbers with social media benchmarks for the industry. For example, the average Facebook post engagement rate for higher education is 1.45%.

This will cover your internal analysis. But what about the industry at large? That's when you should rely on competitive benchmarking and trend analysis.

By the end of the audit, you will have a clear idea about:

• Content themes and formats your audience prefers

• Platforms most suited for enrollment marketing vs. retention marketing

• Most used social media by different groups you're targeting. For example, prospective students prefer Instagram, while parents and faculty usually hang out on X (formerly Twitter).

2. Build ideal audience personas

Humans decide with emotions. But students transitioning to college, parents worried about their child’s future, and professors looking for their next teaching opportunity—even more so.

That’s why your ideal audience personas should be a study of those emotions: Their frustrations, motivations, interests, values, and beliefs. But also:

• Demographics (age, location, gender, goals, etc.)

• Online behavior

• Pain points

• Content preferences

• Communication preferences (preferred tone and social media platform)

The following will get you started on this.

Examples of ideal audience personas for schools and colleges

1. Ideal student persona

Let’s say TJ James is the type of student we want to attract—a “Purpose-driven high flyer.”

His profile can look like:

Pain points

• Confused between multiple career options

• Prioritizes mentorship and guidance

• Wants to excel in academics and extracurriculars

Content preferences

• Educational, long-form videos and podcasts

• Interactive webinars and live Q&As

• Research-heavy articles on novel topics and groundbreaking innovations

Online behavior

• Highly active on socials

• Creates content for personal branding

• Engages with thought leaders

• Shares opinions on current and trending events

2. Parent Persona

Now, what if you’re building the same persona for parents?

Assuming the parent is a “Determined information-seeker with a budget,” we can sketch their profile as below:

Pain points

• Cost of college education

• Availability of financial aid and scholarships

• Their child’s career prospects after graduation

Content preferences

• Interactive, live webinars with faculty

• Explainer videos for complex topics (For example, scholarship applications)

• Alumni success stories

• Testimonials from alums and their parents

Online behavior

• Mostly active after dinner or early in the morning

• Prefers Facebook and LinkedIn over Instagram or TikTok

• Often inquires information through comments and DMs

• Part of a community for parents with college-bound kids

3. Faculty persona

Suppose you’re targeting potential faculty members for STEM courses. We’ll call the persona “Passionate research pioneer with a penchant for pushing academic boundaries.” Here’s what their persona would look like:

Pain points

• Consistently acquiring funding for research projects

• Balancing teaching with research projects

• Struggles to maintain a good work-life balance

• Insufficient resources for complex computing needs

Content preferences

Given the context, leading academics will be interested in learning how your school supports and promotes advancements in ambitious research projects. This is more or less based on hearsay from peers.  But from your end, you can showcase future-forward thinking in STEM with:

• PR articles and LinkedIn posts celebrating a research milestone

• Spotlighting faculty members and their achievements across platforms.

• Faculty testimonials and interviews on YouTube work well.

• Podcasts with revered STEM leaders

Example: Princeton University often spotlights its research wings and technological prowess.

Online behavior

• Mainly uses LinkedIn to build network

• Twitter for personal use and YouTube for educational content

• Active on scientific forums and similar online communities

3. Develop a social media strategy.

Here’s a surprise for you: 41% of school officials can directly attribute increased enrollment to social strategy. Without a social media strategy, you’re shooting arrows in the dark. Maybe even at the wrong targets. So, before you publish a single post, write down your social media strategy.

What to include in the social media strategy document?

There’s no right (or wrong) way of crafting a social media strategy for a school. But your strategy document should ideally be a simple, 3-4 pager covering:

Social media goals

• What’s the purpose of social media marketing? Boosting awareness? Driving enrollment? Attracting alumni involvement? Perhaps all?

• Do you have clear, measurable goals? For example, ‘We will increase YouTube subscribers by 20% in six months using student Vlogs and alumni testimonials.

Audience research

You’ve already done the work.

Add your ideal student persona here. And personas of other audience members you’re targeting. Also, ask:

• Where do they hang out online?

• How (often) do they engage and interact with branded content?

• What are their interests, pains, motivations, and content preferences?

Competitor research

• Who are your competitors?

• What type of content formats work for them? How often do they post across platforms in a week?

• Which format does well for them?

• How do your social media numbers compare to theirs?

Choose social media platforms

• What are the platforms preferred by your core audience? 18-year-old college-bound students, for instance, are hanging out more on Instagram and TikTok.

• Which 2-3 platforms should be the focus of your marketing efforts?

Content strategy

• What type of informational needs do they have? Are they interested in learning about extracurriculars as they are about financial aid?

• Which hashtags to use to maximize engagement?

• What are their favorite content formats?

• Which tactics will you use for a specific strategy? Make a list of both strategies and tactics.

Team structure

• Do you have the resources and staff to achieve the goals?

• What are the individual roles and responsibilities?

• How will you approve and schedule the content for posting?

Voice and tone

• What kind of language should you use? Formal, conversational, casual or humorous?

• How to respond to comments, DMs, and mentions?

• How can the content be made inclusive and accessible?

• What are the do’s and don’ts for brand communication?

KPIs

• How will you know if your strategy is working? Set KPIs for the overall strategy and individual platforms.

• Are they aligned with the overarching social media marketing goals?

• How will you collect qualitative feedback to monitor performance?

Social media audit

• How often should you conduct a social media audit? After every campaign? Quarterly? Half-yearly?

• Are you meeting the set KPIs, or is there room for improvement? What should be the next steps?

• Which platform and content is performing well?

• Which platform and content isn’t performing well?

4. Create a social media content calendar

You’ve got the strategy ready. It’s time to get tactical and build a social media content calendar—preferably well before a fresh semester.

Tick off the following tasks one by one.

Always choose your primary platforms before choosing content themes and formats to work with.

• Types of content will depend on your target audience for a specific platform. TikTok is where most high schoolers hang out.

• Content formats will depend on what the algorithm supports. For example, on X, including images (3 or 4 is even better), GIFs, and videos can give a 2x ranking boost. Replies to tweets also do the same thing.

• Posting times will determine how you schedule your posts across platforms.

Social media plan for colleges: How to fill in the calendar with highly shareable content?

It’s admission season at the moment, so let’s take examples for enrollment marketing.

You can apply the 70-20-10 rule here: 70% for informational content (How-tos, important updates, educational), 20% for emotional (Mission, value, milestones, funny), and 10% for promotional (Direct promotion).

Note: You don’t have to post daily on social media. Decide on the posting frequency based on your objectives and engagement numbers.

5. Double down on engagement tactics

This is what most schools get wrong about social media promotion: They publish good content, and then let the algorithms take the wheel.

What you should do instead is:

In practice, you can map each goal with a corresponding tactic.

For example, Purdue University often responds to tweets mentioning their institute, usually with their cheer phrase: “Boiler Up!” Or the equivalent emoji (🚂 ⬆️) and hashtag (#BoilerUp).

This consistency of brand and a sense of community drives engagement for PU. University of Iowa, on the other hand, taps into pop culture references to keep things casual every now and then.

On Facebook, which is the social playground for most millennials and Gen X (some Boomers, too), they post sentimental, throwback content to attract and engage alumni.

It’s great for gathering authentic testimonials and even better for social proof.

Here’s another method (albeit indirect) of using social media to engage students and parents: Embed a social media wall on your university website showcasing the vibrancy of the campus culture using Flockler to improve dwell time for website visitors.

Stanford does the same for its Residential & Dining Enterprises unit.

6. Select KPIs to track.

It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics. Likes, comments, and shares are good for algorithm signaling. However, building true connections and driving enrollment should be your primary motive.

Keep your set goals as the North Star and choose your KPIs. Every metric should tie back to them.

Selecting KPIs for your school: Suggestions & Examples

Below are two examples of choosing your KPIs based on the goal you’ve set out to achieve.

1. Increase enrollment rate

This is the ultimate goal for every school. But you have no tangible way of knowing if a student joined the school because of your brilliant social media presence. It also doesn’t make sense.

Here’s what to track instead: How did prospective students engage and interact with your enrollment-related content?

• Engagement rate for enrollment-related content: Views and watch hours on your YouTube video on financial aid, engagement numbers on student testimonials, and participation in virtual events like Q&A.

• Social media leads generated: Number of leads acquired through information request forms on socials, webinar sign-ups, and others.

2. Boost brand awareness

Improving your school’s brand awareness means reaching as many target groups (high schoolers, prospective students, faculty, alumni) as possible. In such a case, the following KPIs are good levers of performance.

• Engagement rate: How many people are liking, sharing, and commenting on your

• Amplification rate: How many of your followers are sharing your content (especially user-generated content (UGC) and student achievements) with their own audience?

• Social share of voice (SSoV): How often has your institute mentioned and talked about on socials compared to your competitors?

• PR impact: What is the engagement like for your school’s news articles? What’s the brand sentiment like?

• Traffic to the website: How much referral traffic are you getting from your social media profiles?

7. Analyze social media performance

Analyzing KPIs against your goals and the results obtained is the only way to understand if your strategy is solid.

Take a two-fold approach to assess your social media strategy:

• Analyze what works and what doesn’t

• Adapt your social media strategy accordingly

To simplify the process for your school staff, you can create a structure and process for the social media audits.

Make sure to keep a record and build a report to contextualize, highlight, and convey how the strategy was executed. This will prove dually beneficial.

• Help you analyze errors and improve the strategy

• Report to school stakeholders for additional funds and resources, if needed

Social media tools for higher education

Here are the best social media tools and resources to empower your team.

Best practices to ace social media for schools

Before you go and get started with the checklist, take a look at some best practices for acing social media for schools:

• Don’t promote on every social media platform. Stick to only 3 to 4 primary ones

• Be respectful of other cultures, values, religions, and others

• Don’t post the same updates/posts on different social media accounts at the same time

• Use branded hashtags whenever possible

• Add some form of CTA to drive action

• Reshare, reply, comment, and amplify the content you’re tagged or mentioned in

• Make your content accessible. Add proper captions in videos and alt texts in images, for example

FAQs

1. What is the best social media for schools?

Based on usage, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and X (formerly Twitter) are the best social media platforms for school marketing.

2. How to engage students on social media?

You can engage students on social media with various tactics: Publish visually appealing content, ask questions, run hashtag contests, or let students takeover social media profiles.