Increasing engagement on your educational institution’s Facebook page is necessary when your goal is to provide a helpful, online community for your audience. We are sharing these 4 simple tips to make that task less daunting.
Straighten Out Your Logistics
Tip #1: Understand the available tools that allow your school to organize its content. Learn about your options here.
Before your school gets creative with Facebook content, it is imperative to take inventory on its current content publishing process. Data show that there are certain days and hours throughout the week that have higher engagement rates. If you utilize this data and it does not provide you with increased engagement, you can continue to customize further. If your school publishes Facebook content through a social media management platform like Hootsuite or Sprinklr, you have access to information on which content received the most engagement. Your school can use this to identify the most popular posting times and choose to post at that time moving forward. Once you have the days of the week and times of day that are best to post, you will be on track for higher engagement.
Spotlight Your Students
Tip #2: Look to other schools that are publishing successful, engaging content on their Facebook to give yourself an idea of what content you should be creating. Check out this post from Connections Academy as an example.
Creativity is key when it comes to engaging an audience on Facebook. Whether your school has 5 or 50,000 page followers, gaining their attention is no small feat. One way to do so is through student spotlights where your school provides a success story or testimonial from a student at your school. Whether it is introducing a cool passion project a student is working on, or a student winning their basketball championship, it is important to show your audience that you care about them. Also, people love to hear positive stories! The happier and more interesting a post is, the more likely an audience will stick around to read, like, comment, and share.
Boost Your Popular Posts
Tip #3: Before you get started, take the time to learn how to effectively boost a post. Check out this guide to help get you started.
The best part about Facebook is that it is filled with helpful tools that will increase your school’s engagement. One tool to use is boosted posts, this is a post on your page’s timeline that you put money behind to ‘boost’ its reach to a certain audience. When you choose to boost a post, that post will appear on audiences’ news feeds, similar to an ad. And because of Facebook’s ownership of Instagram, you can also choose to select Instagram as an ad placement for your boosted post. The name “boosted post” says it all, because it boosts your engagement by getting your content in front of more people, and it’s a great way to enhance brand exposure!
Host Engagement Activities
Tip #4: Make a commitment to host an engagement activity at least twice a month. This will allow you to get the conversation following, and guarantee increased engagement on your content. To go a step further, plan activities based around holidays, schools events, or even a fun national day.
Facebook pages are a way for your school’s audience to interact with one another and form a sense of community. One way to enhance this is for your school to host engagement activities, which are posts that encourage users to interact with the content. This may be as simple as a “Happy first day of school! Leave a comment below of your favorite mid-homework snack.” Or “Tag your study buddy in the comments below for a chance to win free school swag.” This stimulates your page, encourages your followers to participate, and increases engagement.
Now that you have learned the importance of increasing engagement on your educational institution’s Facebook page, we encourage you to implement these tips into your day-to-day Facebook content and watch the love from your audience pour in!
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