Interactive Schools Blog
Social media has required schools to reach a new level of transparency. Blogging, specifically, has allowed schools to publish authentic content and forge a strong connection with their community. It has also given schools an opportunity to develop a voice that is hard to replicate on any other platform. Previously, a school would have to rely on journalists or word of mouth to portray the school’s story. This was always a risk on the school, as you would have to trust a 3rd party to represent you in the way you want. Now, you can help define your school’s story.
Heads are the leaders and visionaries of schools. They set the vision, mission and strategy for the school, which is central to their role. Nobody knows the school as well as the head and nobody has the same reach and authority either. This puts the head in a powerful position when it comes to the voice and marketing of the school. To sucessfully market and brand your school, it is essential that the head is involved - after all, people are much more interested in what the head has to say than the marketing person. It is the same with almost every organisation.
You may have heard us talk a lot recently about social influence and authority. Here, at Interactive Schools, we have been busy analysing every UK independent school’s social media activity and authority. This is to give schools clear, actionable data. It is also a clever bit of fun! We will be releasing this data out to schools in next the coming weeks.
It is safe to say that schools have adopted Twitter - 73% of independent schools are on Twitter in some capacity - but there is still some way to go in terms of real engagement. How influential is your school? How engaging is your school? How influential are your followers?
Social is now mobile. More than half of social media access on Twitter and Facebook is through mobile devices. And some social channels are exclusively mobile, think Instagram, Foursquare, Path etc.
Twitter have even come out and suggested that mobile users were more important than desktop users. A big shout, certainly. Instagram was, of course, born on mobile and now look at it! It boasts over a whopping 90 million users and was worth $1 billion when Facebook originally agreed to buy it.
Geolocation is exploding and here’s why:
- Almost every social media channels offers the ability to geotag your location
- Search and social is becoming local
- Mobile usage is huge, and will continue to grow
- Brings offline, online
A distinct new breed of social media personalities has been born, according to an extensive new study by conversation experts first direst. Which one are you?
- The Ultras?
- The Dippers?
- The Deniers?
- The Lurkers?
- The Virgins?
- The Peacocks?
- The Ranters?
- The Changelings?
- The Ghosts?
- The Informers?
- The Quizzers?
- The Approval Seekers?
The online reputation of a school is becoming a critical part of the decision process for prospects. If you Google your school’s name, what appears? Often, parents will search your school’s brand name on Google and begin there. Let’s start.
Google Results
The majority of school’s have at least one negative link of the first page of Google. This is often news articles from major sites such as Huffington Post, Guardian, BBC etc.
Blogging for schools has naturally taken off so far in 2013, and it’s great to see. However, there are still a lot of schools yet to join in. In this post, we’re going to give you an insight into whether or not a blog is actually right for your school and what the benefits of blogging are.
- Does your school have current parents and pupils?
- Does your school have prospective parents and pupils?
- Are they online?
- Do they read online?
If the answer to all these questions is yes, then your school would benefit from a blog. So what benefits does blogging have?
One of the biggest benefits of web analytics is the ability to attribute revenue and goals to a source.
With social media usage exploding, how do we measure the impact it has on our websites? Well, just go to Google Analytics, check out the referrals, then measure behaviour and conversions. Simple, right? Actually, its not that easy. You may look at your referral traffic and notice a lot of traffic from Facebook and Twitter, but this just a small percentage of the true number of social referrals.
Google Analytics is restricted in how much information it can extract - often in referrals from emails, IM clients, some mobile apps and when coming from a secure site to a non-secure site.
Photos are all the rage in the social world right now. To make the best use of photos in your social activities, you should understand what makes them so popular. We have given 5 quick reasons as to why people share and enjoy photos on social media.
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Photos are simple. Photos are both easy to produce, easy to consume and instantly gratifying. Take a picture, write a short interesting caption, make it look pretty and you’re all done! A picture says a thousand words so let your photos do the talking for you. If they are engaging then visitors will naturally comment and share.
We’ve seen in our previous blogs about different metrics to measure your social impact. So far, we have discussed the spreading of content and how to measure conversation. These are highly useful metrics but they do not look into sentiment - do people actually like your content?
To determine whether or not people have enjoyed your content we can look at the applause rate.
